Poll Shows Americans Are Obsessed with North Korea, Overstate Its Threat
Here's an excerpt:
... Theories for North Korea’s rhetoric vary — some say Kim is seeking concessions from the West, others that he’s working to rally his own military’s support — but you will be very hard pressed to find a North Korea analyst who shares the view of 59 percent of Americans that North Korea is willing to launch a nuclear warhead at America.
It’s not clear why Americans who pay more attention to news reports about North Korea are so ill-informed about its military capability and with the expert analysis of the country’s intentions. But, as The Washington Post’s Chico Harlan writes today, this sense of urgent alarm “plays into North Korea’s hands, amplifying the sense of crisis on the Korean peninsula.” One South Korean analyst even suggested this was part of a deliberate “headline strategy” by Pyongyang.
Andrei Lankov, a respected North Korea analyst, warned in a recent New York Times op-ed that all the attention and overstatements of North Korea’s threats actually risk strengthening the country’s hand when it inevitably starts pressing for concessions from the West.
“It does not make sense to credulously take their fake belligerence at face value and give them the attention they want now,” he writes. “It would be better if people in Washington and New York took a lesson from the people of Seoul,” where South Koreans are mostly shrugging off the recent threats.
*Although apparently even Washington can't agree on what to think about whether the North is capable of loading nuclear weapons onto ballistic missiles yet or not.
