A merry dance

Pricly and isolated,North Korea has few enough connections to the outside world. So why keep snapping them,one by one?

Pricly and isolated,North Korea has few enough connections to the outside world. So why keep snapping them,one by one? On May 15th,it announced that it was unilaterally tearing up wage and other agreements governing the Kaesong industrial zone,a joint North-South business project just inside North Korea. South Koreans,it says,can either lump it or leave. The 100 or so South Korean firms that employ 38,000 North Koreans and generate millions of dollars a year for the cash-strapped regime of Kim Jong Il are making contingency plans to bring their people home.

This row joins a veritable conga of others,and not just with South Korea. Mr Kim has told the United Nations Security Council to say sorry for a mild wrist-slapping it gave him after he defied an earlier council injunction and in April with only partial success tested a long-range rocket. And the regime now says it will 8220;never8221; return to six-party talks that have sought to end its suspect nuclear programmes in return for more aid,trade and better relations with America,South Korea,Japan,China and Russia.

Instead Mr Kim is building a new long-range missile testing pad and there is of course new activity at the site used in 2006 for a nuclear test. The other five parties to the nuclear talks,under the guise of showing patience,seem at a loss as to what to do.

Mr Kim is a past master at extorting aid using threats. He is clearly not unclenching his fist to grasp the hand extended by Barack Obama earlier this year. Yet Mr Kim8217;s fit of belligerence may be aimed less at testing America8217;s new president than at showing 8220;strength8221; to shore up his regime,argues Mark Fitzpatrick of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. One reason perhaps is that South Korea8217;s president,Lee Myung-bak,has taken a firmer line than his predecessor,expecting reciprocity-such as more family reunions between the Koreas-if more than just humanitarian food aid is to flow northward. Another possible reason is that Mr Kim8217;s own ill-health seems to have led to jockeying for position among his three sons and their supporters.

North Korean officials nowadays make little secret of their wish to be recognised as a nuclear-weapons power. They want America to treat with them,they say privately,just as it does with nuclear-capable India which,though it has kept its bombs and ignored global anti-nuclear rules,last year won exemption from nuclear-trade restrictions with help from America8217;s outgoing Bush administration. Another negotiating ploy? Or Mr Kim now determined to strut his stuff regardless?

The Economist Newspaper Limited 2009