Page:U.S Congressional Testimony of Sung-Yoon Lee, Hearing on "North Korea’s Diplomatic Gambit- Will History Repeat Itself/1



Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and distinguished members of the Subcommittee:

I am honored to have this opportunity to present my views on how best to address North Korea’s 2018 version of post-provocation peace ploy.

I. North Korea’s Unconventional Antics are Approximately Predictable

When pundits intone North Korea is “unpredictable,” what they actually mean is that the ultra-weird, cultish Kim dynasty is “unconventional.” Isolationist, poor, nasty, brutish, and strangely buffoonish, the North Korean regime defies the conventions of the “nation state” or “rational actor.” Hence, its strangely bellicose rhetoric and threatening actions come across as “unpredictable” or “irrational,” while its post-provocation concessionary ploys, such as calling for talks and summit meetings, creates variously illusions of “crisis averted” and even a “breakthrough.”

The North Korean regime is a bizarre composite of contradictions. For example, the leadership deifies itself and revels in luxuries while systematically depriving its population of the even the most basic rights, such as, of the freedom of domestic travel, access to foreign media, and as the UN Commission of Inquiry Report on Human Rights in North Korea alleges, the “right to food and related aspects of the right to life.” The regime approaches foreign policy with a mix of medieval unsophistication and avant-garde criminality. The nation boasts of having become a full-fledged nuclear state after firing an inter-continental ballistic missile with the range to hit every corner of the United States, while without fail each year secures its place in the world’s

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