“…Now, almost seven years and huge quantities of the Western and Chinese help later, we can add another relevant point to this list of shame: North Korea’s dictator has been threatening the US and its allies with nuclear attack. That it has come to this is the unhappy result of a strategy of appeasement and bribes the West pursued long after it became evident they weren’t achieving the desired result. What the West has done is reward bad behaviour in the forlorn hope that it would not get any worse. That has failed, obviously.
So where did an impoverished and often starving nation get the technologies and the resources to develop its missiles? Where did the navigation guidance, computerisation and rocket fuel technologies come from? And what of the fissile engineering, nuclear physics, satellite expertise and all the other other arcane knowledge needed to build a bomb and, according to intelligence estimates, be poised to miniaturise it? Where did all that knowledge come from? It would be naïve to think North Korea had such homegrown expertise.
All of the above was not apparent even ten years ago, when few would have thought it credible that a famished nation could make such seven-league strides. So how did they did they do it? Please indulge by considering the military parades we see in Moscow and Beijing, noting how those in Pyongyang are cut from very much the same cloth. Think, too, of similar events in Teheran. I guarantee some understanding will dawn on you. In all cases the external policies of the respective states are profoundly anti-Western, while their internal policies make aggression a byword for loyalty and paranoia a virtue.
The Kim dynasty has survived as long as it has in large part because myopic, gutless and naïve Western politicians found it easier, time after time, to kick the can down the road, buying “peace” with appeasement and largesse. Remember a certain Mr Chamberlain waving that piece of paper on the steps of an aeroplane just returned from Berlin? As he soon learned, making nice with tyrants doesn’t work, not for long anyway. In bowing repeatedly before the Kim dynasty’s demands, we have abetted the misery and terror inflicted daily on 28 million North Koreans. We are guilty of the crime, as the quotation atop this short essay explains, of undeserved compassion. We have been kind to the cruel. We are responsible…” Cowardly Charity’s Culpable Cruelty