There is a lot happening in the U.S. news cycle, primarily due to the president of this nation being exposed as having engaged in a pattern of criminal acts that, due to his stature, other people with stature must decide to either prosecute him for or immunize him against. This means Donald Trump has ignored North Korea for several weeks, and the North Korean leadership is annoyed by this.
So they fired off two more short-range missiles on Thursday in an attempt to get the United States’ attention. North Korea desperately wants the end of world sanctions against it. Throwing things has been the go-to tactic for summoning the United States and other players back to the negotiation table if the dictatorship feels things are going too slowly, or in the wrong direction.
In this case it's not likely to do much. Trump himself desperately wants a foreign policy win, to be sure, but the man has been increasingly petulant and scatterbrained as the investigations against him continue, with a staff now focused on goading the world into another Persian Gulf conflict rather than the far thornier meal of a conflict with a fellow nuclear power. North Korea will have to wait its turn.
The world is governed by children, incidentally. You need not pretend most international diplomacy is based on anything more rigorous than the usual tantrum-remorse-bargaining-tantrum cycle. When we ourselves were children, most of us likely operated under the general assumption that the Most Important People In The World got there by being so super-smart that the rest of the world could not help but put them in charge of things. (It was the Important People who most emphasized this theory, to be sure.)
In reality, the top leadership spots in the world are far more often taken by people who have not significantly progressed since pre-pubescence and yet have lived to adulthood, avoiding the usual pitfalls of open manhole covers and making a meal out of things labeled do not eat, largely because their families had enough wealth to keep doctors and an open manhole protection team on hand at all times.
But I digress. Where were we? Ah yes, the North Korean dictator is pouting because the U.S. news cycle has not been paying enough attention to him. Hopefully, the now-rote press stories this morning will suffice for a bit. You can see why he and Trump are so confident they understand one another, though. And to be honest, the dictatorship could probably save quite a bit of money on "missile tests" if someone would just set Kim Jong Un up with his own Twitter account.
