Assisting our allies is also a vital part of our strategic interest in promoting the growth of stable democracies, thereby safeguarding our own interests. Therefore, continued American engagement in Asia, particularly in Korea and Japan, is a relatively low-cost military operation which provides substantial and continuing rewards to the United States. However, Asia also presents us with potential threats as well as opportunities. One of the most serious threats is the ominous conventional and nuclear military threat posed by North Korea. After four decades of uneasy military truce, North Korea still presents the world with great ambiguity and paradox, both weakness and strength.
Some people easily dismiss North Korea as a small, isolated, basket-case country.
But that is a dangerous action when you are eyeball to eyeball with one of the world's largest armies across the most militarized area of the earth. North Korea's rigid dictatorship and overly excessive dependence on military development at the expense of basic economic, political and social development are clearly major weaknesses. But the North's military threat is also a twisted form of strength. Burdened with a discredited political system and failed economy, denied the previous security support it once received from the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc nations and now kept at a cool distance by China, the aging warlord Kim Il-Sung continues to use raw military power in an attempt to have the world take his hermit kingdom seriously. It is a mistake to think of North Korea as a normal nation-state.