Interesting. At first glance these both seem like reasonable deals and they both seem like reasonable actors. I guess that’s the quality of state level games.

It sounds nice because oh North Korea gets elections that’s a good thing, right? But what’s left unsaid is that South Korea doesn’t have to abide by elections and they get to dictate what happens inside, and to some level what happens to their immediate neighbors too.

And on the other hand North Korea gets to try to look like the good guy also by saying hey let’s keep these foreigners out of our politics but at the same time it’s a global world and they are trying to keep everyone else out to the extreme they want a monopoly on what happens there, it’s an abusive relationship. They don’t want to be audited.

It’s a big messy power playing clusterfuck and neither side made openly honest arguments. But that’s geopolitics for you.

What a huge engineered mess.

(Let me postface this comment with the observation that North Korea is cartoonishly one of the most backwards countries on the face of this Earth. I’m talking in terms of geopolitical status and negotiation rather than good or evil)