Five Days In North Korea

Nicholas Kristof just returned from North Korea:

On just the first day of a war between the United States and North Korea, according to a Stanford University assessment, one million people could be killed.

Yet after my five-day visit to North Korea with three New York Times colleagues, such a nuclear war seems terrifyingly imaginable. In the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, it was clear that President Trump’s threat to ‘totally destroy’ North Korea had backfired and is being exploited by Kim Jong-un for his own propaganda and military mobilization.

The country has seized on Trump’s words to reinforce its official narrative that its nuclear arsenal is defensive, meant to protect Koreans from bullying American imperialists. And North Korean officials use Trump’s bombast as an excuse for their own.