North Korea is on the verge of taking another step backward

It’s probably asking too much of a young man thrust into leadership of his nation by his father’s death, but North Korea’s Kim Jong Un has an opportunity to break with tradition and do what’s best for his people.

And that would be putting the need to feed North Korea’s masses above the need to rattle North Korea’s saber by launching a new rocket.

Of course it’s quite possible that to launch or not to launch is not even a decision Kim can make. It has only been 100 days since his father, Kim Jong Il, died, so 28-year-old Kim’s aunt and uncle and cadre of military leaders may be calling more of the shots than he is.

Still, North Korea and the United States reached an understanding under which the United States would provide desperately needed food in exchange for North Korea’s curtailment of its nuclear ambitions. And while North Korea says the rocket it’s planning to fire will be a scientific test of its peaceful satellite launching capabilities, the United States, South Korea and Japan see it as a test of a potential intercontinental ballistic missile.

While attending a meeting of 60 world leaders in Seoul, South Korea, to discuss ways of keeping nuclear material out of the hands of terrorists, President Barack Obama appealed to North Korean leaders to “have the courage” to curtail their nuclear weapons programs. He also appealed to China to use its influence over North Korea in guiding that nation on a path that is in the best interest of North Koreans and regional peace.

Breaking a pattern

Then he made it clear that the United State is no longer willing to reward North Korea for its bad behavior and duplicity. “There’s been a pattern for decades in which North Korea thought that if they acted provocatively, they would be bribed into ceasing and desisting,” Obama said. “We’re going to break that habit.”

North Korea announced its plan to launch its new rocket shortly after Washington thought it had a breakthrough deal with Pyongyang that traded food aid for a nuclear freeze.

An unidentified North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman responded to Obama’s appeal by saying the U.S. president was operating from a “wrong conception.” North Korea, the spokesman said in the statement carried by the North’s official Korean Central News Agency, “consistently maintained that a moratorium on long-range missile launches does not include satellite launches for peaceful purposes.”

And so it appears that Kim — or whoever is running North Korea — intends to fire its rocket about two weeks from now as a tribute to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Kim Il Sung, the founder of the regime and Kim Jong Un’s grandfather.

And in so doing he will usher in a few more years, or perhaps a few more decades, of starvation for people trapped in what is likely the modern world’s most isolated and vainglorious monarchy.