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Comment by benjoffe | Hacker News Reader

A rational North Korean state would not engage in nuclear war in just about any scenario as it would mean almost certain destruction for itself in response. To help persuade their enemies not to invade they try to appear as irrational as possible.

There's an interesting segment in this psychology lecture about irrationality that seems related:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5IrSEIPdwk#t=44m36s

    There is some advantage to being irrational, to having a temper.
    Because if you have a temper and you're known to be irrational, people
    are forced, by dint of your irrationality, to treat you better. Who am
    I going to take from? The person who's extremely reasonable or the
    person who has a hair-trigger temper? Well, I'm going to pick on a
    reasonable person because the unreasonable person might do unreasonable
    things. And this is faintly paradoxical, but often to be irrational, or
    at least to have a reputation for mild irrationality, gives you an
    edge.

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I don't believe there's any advantage to being irrational or having a temper. Sooner or later someone is going to call your bluff. If you initiate violence, you might get your ass kicked by someone stronger. If you flip out irrationally, they can simply laugh at you as you flail about, or begin ignoring you / avoiding you.

When someone calls your bluff, it's game over. Everything changes from that point forward. Either you can never act that way again, because people will know it's a bluff, or you freak out and do something terrible and then one way or another will be dealt with (police called, go to jail, get put on ignore, get an ass kicking, get nuked to complete annihilation, whatever).

The tragedy here is that America has subsidized North Korea's behavior and ability to exist. We're partially responsible for their regime thinking it can keep doing this, and naturally their threats have to escalate. Their bluff should have been called a very long time ago. It's like taking in someone bullying you, clothing him, feeding him, etc.

Do you or any of your family members live in Seoul?

I'm not connecting the point between that question and my position on whether being irrational or having a temper is advantageous.

If you were just asking to be nice, I have a few old friends in South Korea (in the military, teaching, and local) but no family.

How do you figure that America is subsidizing them? We've tried invading them, ignoring them, and buying them off, and none of them worked very well.

The key point is that this is really a proxy war between China and the US. North Korea exists only as a proxy of China - they cannot be defeated in war until China allows it, they will continue to exist as they do as long as China allows it, and the regime will collapse about 10 minutes after China stops supporting them. The current state of affairs exists because China likes having a thorn in our side and very much does not like having a close US ally on their border.

The only plausible end that I can see is them doing something so provocative that China gets fed up with them and afraid that they'll be drawn into a shooting war, and forces the Kim dynasty out and somebody who is reasonable and favors Chinese-style reforms in.

Much like Nixon's Madman theory when it came to US foreign policy in the early 70's.

"His administration, the executive branch of the federal government of the United States from 1969 to 1974, attempted to make the leaders of other countries think Nixon was mad, and that his behavior was irrational and volatile. Fearing an unpredictable American response, leaders of hostile Communist Bloc nations would avoid provoking the United States."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory

I like better sources that poorly sourced Wikipedia articles for controversial statements like this. I'm not sure I have enough evidence to believe the statement in your kind comment. (I'm a Wikipedian, which is why I'm deeply dubious about politically tendentious statements cited to Wikipedia.)

I have read other accounts of that "strategy" being used by Nixon - would take me a while to find the exact references so I used that Wikipedia article.

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