You Can Almost Make It Out

Why is North Korea test-launching missiles again? Michael Breen on possible signs of change in the time of Kim Jong-un—and the challenge of seeing them clearly at all. Brought to you by [Valas Los Angeles]( Recently on The Signal: Jennifer Sciubba on why birth rates around the world dropping. … Today: Why is North Korea test-launching missiles again? Michael Breen on possible signs of change in the time of Kim Jong-un. … Also: Dario Cristiani on the popular appeal of the populist right in Italy. … Subscribe to The Signal? Share with a friend. Sent to you? Sign up [here](. Obscured by Clouds NASA On April 22, Pyongyang fired a barrage of rockets into the East Sea, in what it said was the first test of a new command-and-control system for launching nuclear counterattacks. The test was just the latest in a series over the past few months: In March, North Korea tested long-range artillery; back in January, a hypersonic missile that could evade defense systems in South Korea and the U.S.; before that, in December, a non-nuclear ballistic missile that could reach the U.S. mainland. Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un declared that the tests in March and April were responses to joint South Korean-U.S. military exercises underway at the time. But a number of analysts have seen the episodes as signs of something else: that Pyongyang is preparing a military attack. Late last year, it announced it henceforth considers South Korea a hostile country and no longer seeks reunification with it. Then, in January, Robert Carlin and Siegfried Hecker, two U.S. officials who’ve worked on North Korea for decades—Carlin with the State Department and CIA, Hecker as the former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, the U.S. center for nuclear-weapons research—[released an influential report]( detailing why they think Kim has made the decision to go to war. What’s going on in Pyongyang? Michael Breen has lived in South Korea for more than 40 years and is the author of three books on the two Koreas, including a biography of Kim’s father, Kim Jong-il. According to Breen, outside observers always have to interpret North Korean weapons tests through layers of possible meaning, often difficult to parse. Still, in the moment, he sees evidence that the tests potentially belong to the start of a transformative change—in a country long known for almost no change. After decades of privileging the military above all other institutions in North Korea, the government in Pyongyang is now instead showing signs of focus on broad economic development. But if he’s right, Breen says, it means Kim is trying to alter his country’s economy without altering its totalitarian politics—raising an enormous question about where and how far this change could go. [Read on]( Advertisement From Michael Breen at The Signal: “Toward the end of last year, and again early this year, Kim Jong-un pronounced that his regime’s was now opposed to the reunification of North and South Korea—saying South Korea should be seen as a foreign country like any other. This has enormous implications. Historically, the governments of both Koreas have considered it a sacred task—which they’ve enshrined in their constitutions—to reunify the peninsula under a single government. And in the North, that idea has been at the heart of the whole conceit for running their country like a military base.” “By the 1980s, it was clear that of the Koreas’ two different economic-development models, South Korea’s was the more successful—even though after the Korean War, the North had started out with the more industrialized economy. Today, there’s no economic competition between the countries—and no one’s been expecting a military operation by either side to reunify the peninsula. Instead, analysts have been expecting one of two things: a coup in the North to replace a leadership that badly lost its economic competition with the South; or an acceptance in the North that the South has the better model—and with that, an opening of the North’s economy, like the former general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Deng Xiaoping opened China’s in 1979.” “They know if they did anything serious, they’d be thrashed by South Korea and the U.S. Over the past 20 years, Pyongyang has provoked small incidents here and there, but they’ve always been very careful not to provoke a major retaliation. One reason why South that calculation would apply now no less than ever is that the current government in Korea has made it very clear that it will retaliate in an overwhelming manner to any attack from the North. It’s a stance Seoul hasn’t taken so explicitly in some time. That said, North Korea’s nuclear capability does remain a serious threat—as does North Korea’s ability to strike the U.S. mainland with non-nuclear missiles.” [Members can access the full conversation here]( FROM THE FILES A Destra Bogdan Todoran Journalists at Rai, Italy’s public broadcaster, went on strike this week over the “suffocating control” they say the country’s populist-right government is now exercising over the network. Recently, the network had canceled a scheduled monologue by the author Antonio Scurati, just a few hours before he was to go on the air for the national holiday commemorating Italy’s liberation from Benito Mussolini’s National Fascist Party during World War II. According to the Rai journalists’ union, managers and on-air talent at the network had meanwhile been pushed out of jobs for criticism of the Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), the party leading the country’s ruling coalition and a political descendant of Mussolini’s Fascists. Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s prime minister and Fratelli d’Italia’s leader, responded by publishing the monologue on her Facebook page—defying the accusation that her government was censoring Scurati and dismissing the opposition as “crying at the regime.” In July 2022, two months before Meloni won Italy’s general elections, Dario Cristiani explored what a Fratelli d’Itali government would mean—for the country and for Europe. While Meloni’s party would be unlikely to have much of an impact on the policies of the European Union, Cristiani says, [it would be a matter of time before her ideas of “order and tradition” took shape in Italian public life](. To read full articles, access our complete archive, and support a new genre in current affairs: [Join The Signal]( Coming soon: Alice Han on the surge in Chinese exports of advanced technologies—and the emerging global backlash to it … Subscribe to The Signal? Share with a friend. Sent to you? Sign up [here](. 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