INORDINATE FEAR OF COMMUNISM. The harder I think about it, the less I understand why Bill Perry and Ashton Carter want to bomb North Korea to stop them from testing the Taepodong 2 missile. They say we don't need to worry that the DPRK will retaliate since "an invasion of South Korea would bring about the certain end of Kim Jong Il's regime within a few bloody weeks of war, as surely he knows." But by the same token, he surely knows that launching a nuclear missile at the United States would bring about the certain end of his regime. So what are we worried about?
It seems to me that we shouldn't let the North Koreans send us into these states of periodic panic -- it only serves to encourage them to keep acting up to get a rise out of us. Their technology is crappy, their country is dirt poor and militarily inferior to South Korea, to say nothing of Japan or the United States. There's nothing in North Korea that we could conceivably want (cabbage? starving people? the world's weirdest subway?) and it's the most contained country on earth. The serious DPRK-related policy question is what we and our allies -- notably the aforementioned South Korea and Japan -- will do once the northern regime inevitably falls.
--Matthew Yglesias
