Kim Jong Un

Subject: Kim Jong Un

The question we all have to ask ourselves is have the lines guiding our behaviour in terms of conflict changed since the rules of engagement were first mooted.
The potential for conflict with North Korea is on a knife edge. The UN is debating as I write whether to place more sanctions on the country in retaliation for its missal and atomic weapon program. Kim Jong Un the leader of a savage ideological primed country seems impervious to dialogue. His sabre rattling towards not only the region around his country to the south but now his overt challenge to the might of the USA and a President not known for his diplomacy or intellectual responsibility  loads the fragile situation with all kinds of portent.
The history of the world is littered with wars started by individuals in power but unstable in temperament to carry the responsibility a leader has for not only for his people but mankind in general. The current phase of the suicide bomber willing to give his or her life for a cause brings into stark relief the aptitude people can have for ideological mayhem.
Even in the diplomatically sound tribunals, where heads of state would weigh their armies and the strategic advantage they thought they had for a quick victory (it will be over by Christmas) inevitably they got it wrong and millions perished in the process.
With Kim Jong Un apparently unstable, stimulated by his emotional unstable supporters and a regime that has been preparing for years for just such a moment we all hold our breath. An impoverished nation when evaluated by traditional means but with a million men and women under arms trained to die for their sun emperor, with weapon systems the British Army would die for, it all seems dangerously surreal.
Going to sleep each night as we do, expecting to wake each morning, it's a sobering thought to think our lives and the lives of our children rest in the heads of people who should, for their own safety (and really we mean our safety) be placed in a secure institution.
The situation in Korea has been allowed to fester, 'realpolitik' was displaced by libertine ideology and as with so much misplaced 'consideration for the rights of the people involved' the distortion of reality has been allowed to become 'the norm'.
What amazes me is the apparent Chinese intransigence and a reluctance to bring the North Koreans to the negotiating table. They are the only economic pipe line through which the nation trades. The unwillingness to see the country go under and become either an impoverished client state or to risk a South Korean takeover which implicitly means the US would be on their doorstep.
Of course a nuclear war on their doorstep would be unimaginably worse so perhaps a radical rethink with the UN showing some sort of backbone to ensure that member states, each and everyone of them sang from the same hymn sheet for a change.
I'm turning off the light. Let's hope there isn't a white flash in the sky tonight as mankind  
commits its final act of lunacy.