Word: kim
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Even since before the mystifying Kim Jong Il took power in 1995, the outside world has tried mightily to figure out how the North Korean regime works. Spy satellites are trained on suspected nuclear sites 24 hours a day. The U.S.'s "Big Ear" - the National Security Agency - eavesdrops on communications. Defectors from the North have been thoroughly scrubbed and spies have been recruited. During the presidency of George W. Bush, diplomats from the U.S. and four other countries talked, on and off, for years with their counterparts from Pyongyang...
...change. North Korea is already the world's most isolated country. The only thing that would meaningfully "deepen" that isolation would be for China to shut down trade entirely across its border - something Beijing has never given any indication that it's prepared to do. The idea that Kim Jong Il's regime even cares if the nation's isolation "deepens" is dubious at best. As for the U.N., it met in emergency session just after the long-range missile launch in April and gently tightened sanctions that were already having no demonstrable effect on North Korea's behavior...
...held during the Bush years. But Beijing may be coming to the reluctant conclusion, if it hasn't already, that North Korea means what it says: it intends to be a state armed with nuclear weapons, whether the rest of the world likes it or not. (See pictures of Kim Jong...
...fundamental notion underlying U.S. diplomacy with Pyongyang, going back to Bill Clinton's first term as President, is that North Korea can be bribed. In this view, everything that Kim's regime says or does is meant simply to up the ante in negotiations and get the U.S. and its negotiating partners to sweeten their offerings. This conviction is widely shared among career diplomats in Seoul as well, and they joined their State Department colleagues in outrage when the Bush Administration at first took a confrontational approach with the DPRK. Bush's hard-line stance, the critics believe, prompted Pyongyang...
...Read an interview with Kim Bain-Moore, the First Lady of fishing...