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Russia Writes Off 90 Percent of North Korea Debt
jones_supa (887896) writes "In Russia, the State Duma (lower house) on Friday ratified a 2012 agreement to write off the bulk of North Korea's debt. It said the total debt stood at $10.96 billion as of Sept. 17, 2012. Russia sees this lucrative in advancing the plans to build a gas pipe and railroad through North to South Korea. The rest of the debt, $1.09 billion, would be redeemed during the next 20 years, to be paid in equal installments every six months. The outstanding debt owed by North Korea will be managed by Russia's state development bank, Vnesheconombank. Moscow has been trying to diversify its energy sales to Asia away from Europe, which, in its turn, wants to cut its dependence on oil and gas from the erstwhile Cold War foe. Russia's state-owned top natural producer Gazprom is dreaming shipping 10 billion cubic meters of gas annually through the Koreas. Russia has written off debts to a number of impoverished Soviet-era allies, including Cuba. North Korea's struggling communist economy is just 2 percent of the size of neighboring South's."
north korea is the westboro baptist church of countries
they want to offend
like an internet troll, every negative reaction is positive reinforcement
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
In long term, massively. South Korea will get much cheaper gas, and it might have a stabilizing effect and North Korea will likely be even more closely tied to South through the financial benefits of the functioning pipeline, such as transit fees.
The main problem is that North Korea may start behaving like Ukraine with the gas, stealing it from the pipeline and even using it as a weapon against South Korea. But potential of getting gas pipeline in South Korea will likely far outweigh the cons.
To *be* bat-shit crazy, or to *appear* bat-shit crazy? Appearing insane can be an excellent military strategy, especially if you're in an extremely week tactical position such as North Korea is in. It makes your enemies extremely hesitant to provoke you because you may quite possibly engage in a completely disproportional and/or unexpected response. Of course keeping up the appearance requires that you do occasionally actually engage in insane behavior, but a sane commander using such tactics will be extremely canny in employing such behavior only when a studied analysis of the enemy suggests that he can get away with it with minimal real costs. The fact that North Korea is not only still standing, but has managed to repeatedly milk the western world for lucrative concessions despite the apparent insanity of its leaders, strongly suggests that that is the case.
Of course the beauty of such a strategy is that your enemy can never be completely sure exactly how much is an act, and must moderate their own behavior in the face of that uncertainty. Would North Korea launch an all-out attack on our regional allies in response to some moderate provocation, knowing full well that they would be completely obliterated in response? Certainly not. Probably. We hope.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Assassinating North Korean leadership would be fairly easy for US today if it wanted to do it.
The reason it's not been done is the fact that sudden power vacuum would cause a collapse of North Korean state, and North Koreans have proven to be extremely difficult to acclimate to South Korean society, where they would massively flood to.
Believe it or not, the biggest proponent of keeping the current leadership in power is South Korea. They are the ones who would take by far the biggest hit from North's collapse. They advocate long term assimilation policy instead, where North Korean leadership is slowly made more and more dependent on South's money until eventually they have to open their own country enough for cultural exchange to start to happen, demolishing the power base.