Henny Penny, Chicken Little warn: N Korea’s sky is falling

Is Kim Jong Un about to go to war, sending his fancy new missiles to wreak havoc on one or more enemy countries? Will the first target be in Japan? South Korea? The United States (specifically Guam, which is within range)?

Two longtime North Korea watchers – why do I want to call them Henny Penny and Chicken Little? – warn in a seriously light-on-evidence January 11 think tank article that “we must seriously consider a worst case.”

The North Koreans, they say, “may target the weakest point – psychologically as well as materially – in what the three capitals hope is a watertight US-ROK-Japan military position.”

Their claim that “Kim Jong Un has made a strategic decision to go to war” has gone viral, scaring the bejesus out of commentators around the world.

The evidence cited is mainly North Korean propaganda:

The two American authors (their real names are Robert L Carlin and Siegfried S Hecker) also psychoanalyze Kim from afar:

Hardly any outsider is prepared to claim to have been privy to what the secretive, self-isolated Kim family of absolute rulers is really up to. Readers looking for reasonably informed views on whether it’s time to make a canned goods run to stock the family bomb shelter are left to rely on guesses by experienced North Korea watchers who know at least a little.

I’ll chime in, having spent the better part of 13 years producing a book that chronicles the regime’s first two generations. (A library near you probably has a copy.)

Pyongyang watchers generally can be divided into two factions. Members of the faction that I usually land with – call us realists – are a hard sell for any claim that the North Korean leaders deviate significantly from the playbook bequeathed to them by the late founding