North Korea likes to be in the limelight - and it well knows how to get there. Faced with a world most interested in combating financial meltdown and a new US administration with its sights fixed firmest on Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Middle East, it has turned to its tried-and-tested ways of old to get attention. As annual military exercises between South Korea and the US began yesterday, it said its 1.2 million-strong army was on full alert and that any attempt to shoot down a planned satellite launch would result in war. Instantly, a nation that had slipped from radars is back centre-stage.
The North is a famously secretive nation, but it has good reason to seek attention. Without global focus, it cannot bargain for the foreign aid it so desperately needs to keep afloat. Time and again over the decades, it has done this to great advantage, whether by military threats, building a nuclear reactor, launching missiles or setting off an atomic weapon. With six-party talks to end its nuclear programme stalled and a lack of interest in preventing the launch of the satellite, its next step was to up the ante. The ploy has worked.
Washington's new envoy for North Korea, Stephen Bosworth, said in Seoul yesterday that any launch by Pyongyang would be 'very ill-advised'. In the region to kick-start the denuclearisation process, he rightly said that the only way forward was through negotiations. It is an approach that US President Barack Obama has advocated to solve his country's foreign policy challenges - although the determination being shown towards Afghanistan and the Middle East has not been so apparent in the case of North Korea.
The North won fuel oil and was crossed off the US list of most dangerous nations in the first pact signed over its nuclear programme. It has been less successful in winning incentives from South Korea and Japan. The latter wants a dispute over kidnapped citizens resolved, while tensions have risen with the South since its president, Lee Myung-bak, took office a year ago with a harder line towards Pyongyang. A series of peace agreements between the Koreas was scrapped by the North in January.
North Korea threatens regional peace and stability. Its satellite launch will double as a long-range missile test. Minds are foremost on finding a way out of the economic crisis and fighting Muslim extremism, but concerted effort also has to be put towards ending Pyongyang's weapons proliferation.
