Slightly related, I ran nmap scans on the known NK internet for a while.
The data can be found here: https://github.com/benediktkr/nk-scans
The data can be found here: https://github.com/benediktkr/nk-scans
"Kim Jong Un, Chairman of the Workers' Party of Korea, Chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the DPRK and Supreme Commander of the Korean People's Army, visited the Sohae Space Centre to inspect the ground jet test of a new type high-power engine of a carrier rocket for the geo-stationary satellite."
It sounds really hilarious, but it reminds me of the soviet era in the Warsaw Pact member states. Poor citizens. We are so lucky to have a degree of control over our supreme leadership..
But the point I was really trying to make is that calling NK anyone's puppet is not really accurate, and arguably never was. They are certainly dependent on China nowadays, but it is far from clear who is pulling whose strings.
In any case, "puppet" was incidental to my comment, and I'm happy to let that go. My main point was that they were set up very similarly to the Warsaw Pact countries, so the similarity in language is entirely expected.
[1] That is, without having a humanitarian crisis and state with nuclear explosives (and might have viable nuclear warheads) in civil war on their back doorstep.
I can see both sides to the dispute over how to handle DPRK. If Mexico got very politically unstable and started making nuclear explosions and likely had a missle-portable warhead, the U.S. would get touchy if China started proposing actions that could easily touch off a Mexican civil war. In hindsight, I hope they realize that they should have pushed the DPRK harder earlier and run a higher risk of a civil war in the pre-nuclear-explosive DPRK in exchange for heading off warhead development.
On the other hand, I remember how the Soviet Union seemed like it was here forever, right up until it wasn't. That didn't turn out great, but it stayed contained and nobody got nuked.
China's interests are preventing NK from getting too far out of hand and China ends up flooded with millions of NK refugees.
It has generally become unfashionable to have puppet states nowadays. They're too hard to maintain.
Are you repeating n-th hand propaganda? I kind of don't blame you since Google refuses to dig up the story of "Soviet-Iranian Agreement of Cooperation" of 1966. This agreement was reached because the West refused to support Iran's industrialization program under the Shah, so the "puppet" went ahead and reached an agreement with USSR.
Intelligence Memorandum, CIA, June 1967: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000381440....
Quite possible. The document you cite was news to me. Maybe there has never been an actual U.S. puppet state, I don't know.
"There is a deeply disturbing trend in the world of ever increased deference to power. The free press is ..."
I respectfully suggest to you that this is no "trend".
Could be many things, of course. But if Hacker News traffic is enough to overload an entire country's Internet...