North Korea

Well this is certainly not a surprising development. Apparently North Korea has decided, once again, to start threatening America and South Korea with nuclear anihilation. One can rest assured, this is a fairly routine threat coming from the Kim regime, as they always make statements with this type of violent rhetoric. However, there's a massive and much more frightening difference in this series than in the past: there's enough credible intelligence to suggest that they may actually take their extremely violent rhetoric and turn it into real violence.

Why the Kim regime insists on picking a fight with the Obama administration goes beyond any logical sense. True, America does have soldiers (28,000 to be exact) stationed in South Korea, which the North views as a major threat to its sovereignty. It's also true that China does not look favorably on this situation as well, but does not go out of its way to make the situation worse by consistently threatening invasion or other military action. What's missing here is that America does not wish to keep those soldiers in that area of the world, but feels it has few options due to the continual violent threats that come from the North.

Well because of the Kim regime's threats of a preemptive nuclear strike on America, the Obama administration has taken the precaution of placing 14 more anti-ballistic missiles in both California and Alaska. In fact, the American Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel made the announcement that the administration took this action as a deterrent to any North Korean missile launches. One of the ways the Obama administration pulled this off was by all-together scrapping the planned project of placing a missile shield in both Poland and Romania (the cancellation has brought a more cooperative attitude from Russia), which freed up funds to put the additional missiles on the West Coast and possibly to construct one on the East Coast as well.

As for Russia, I think that Pres. Obama and Secs. Kerry and Hagel made the point clear to Pres. Putin and company that America needs its help in dealing with this and the Iranian nuclear issue, as well as to maintain the continuing progress on disarming both the American and Russian nuclear arsenals. However, there's also a message going out to China at the same time.

For China, the message is very simple. America, while not seeking to contain it, wants to get the concept across that China needs to be more proactive about reigning in its small, yet provocative ally, North Korea, if it does not wish to see a larger American military presence in the area. Knowing Chinese aversion to any massive American military build-up in its neighborhood, it's easy to see why China will cooperate with America.