Mad, bad North Korea may just be an act

One day North Korea's military command orders live-fire artillery and missile exercises off its east coast, and the next day South Korea says fairly soon firms from the country will be shipping products to and though the North's special economic zones.

Against this background, the question is whether Kim Jong-un is mad - or desperately trying to consolidate his power.

President Barack Obama caught the essence of doubts about the sanity of Kim, scion of the dynasty founded by his grandfather "Great Leader" Kim Il-sung in 1945, when he compared the North's behaviour with that of Iran, finding that Iran's leaders were rational while North Korea's were not. "If you look at Iranian behaviour, they are strategic," Obama remarked. Iran might embrace "ideas that I find abhorrent, but they're not North Korea".

If North Korea represents an extreme, however, conflicting reports about North Korea's current behaviour share a common denominator - the quest by its leaders to rescue their crumbling economy while sticking to the appearance of a tough policy against historic foes.

North Korean strategists - no one is quite certain who they really are - may be considerably more sophisticated than Obama thinks. Their underlying pragmatism was evident last month when the North abandoned its threat to cancel the first reunions since 2010 of families divided by the Korean War unless the US and South Korea called off their planned military exercises.

The next test of North Korea as a rational actor is whether the North will accept the plea of South Korea's President Park Geun-hye for regular reunions. The North for the moment is rejecting her plea, passing on word that the atmosphere is not appropriate. That response appears calculated, along with the missile tests, to show North Korea's displeasure with US-South Korea exercises.

Once the war games are over next month, however, talks on more reunions are likely to resume. The reason is basic: all the reunions are held in the North's Mount Kumgang tourist zone, closed by South Korea to ordinary tours from the South since a soldier nearly six years ago shot and killed a South Korean woman who had strayed outside the tourist area. North Korea badly wants tours to resume as a source of much-needed income.