Lee Jae Myung reiterates desire for full command back in Seoul’s hands after Donald Trump cuts joint exercises, citing warm ties with Kim Jong-un
While Kim Jong Un builds the most capable war machine in North Korean history, South Korea’s government is dismantling the very measures designed to deter him — and calling it peace. Meanwhile, its own conservative opposition, retired generals, and even sections of its own military bureaucracy say the erosion runs deeper than diplomacy: down to unloaded machine guns at the DMZ, a documented rupture in intelligence-sharing with Washington, and a budget that funds North Korean soccer fans before it funds border radar.
Just curious
Today I treat people’s teeth. Some fifteen winters ago, I crawled across a frozen river with a packet of rat poison clenched in my hand. What closed the distance between those two scenes was not, as I believed for years, my own effort. It was policy.
People tend to think of policy as something remote from their lives—debated in government offices, argued over in the legislature, buried in reports most will never open. But for me, policy was always pressed against the skin. It put me back in a classroom. It let me sleep somewhere warm. In the end, it made me a dentist. This is that story. But to tell it, I have to go back to the day everything collapsed.
I was born in North Korea to a father who was a military officer and a mother who was a physician. In my early childhood, my family lived a life stable enough that many North Koreans would have envied it. I never worried about food. We had a warm home. My mother was respected in our community as a doctor, and my father was a soldier admired by everyone who knew him. As a child, I believed that life would last forever.
Context in play right now:
Possible dynamics worth watching:
Open questions rather than conclusions. The sequence is public. The interactions, if any, are still unfolding.
After 73 years of armistice - not peace - South Korea’s President Lee Jae Myung just proposed historic talks with North Korea: formally end the Korean War, replace the fragile ceasefire with a real peace regime, and discuss practical steps to stop Pyongyang’s advancing nuclear program.
“Let us put down our intentions to threaten each other and begin discussions to end the long-running war as the directly involved parties.” Dialogue for coexistence, not confrontation. Will Pyongyang finally answer? The Korean Peninsula - and the world - are watching.
Source: Yonhap News
After the Korean War, North Korea was initially wealthier than South Korea, largely because it inherited more of Korea's heavy industry and natural resources.
But over the following decades, the economic balance completely reversed.
So what happened? When did the tables turn, and why?