The country is under the control of an egotistical madman.  He is willing to risk his homeland and every citizen in it because of an insane belief that the world which surrounds him is filled with inferior degenerates and cowards.  All he has to do is bluster and confront them with his new found military power, and they will fold and bow to his will as his countrymen have done.  Am I referring North Korea’s Kim Jong-un?  No, I am describing Adolph Hitler, just prior to his annexing the remainder of Czechoslovakia in March of 1939.  His bluff at the infamous Munich Conference had witnessed the takeover of a large portion of that country, the German speaking “Sudetenland”, in September of the previous year.  Up to that time, a large number of the Wehrmacht Generals were worried about Hitler’s schemes.  They feared that the re-militarization of Germany was not complete, and would not be so until 1946 or later.  As as result, the beginnings of a coup plot was started, with the purpose of removing the “Fuhrer” before he destroyed the country with his grandiose schemes.  The bluff at Munich and the subsequent takeover of all of Czechoslovakia proved them wrong. The German people were behind Hitler, and would witness untold death, destruction and horror in the following six years.

Now, a new madman is on the world stage.  His name is Kim Jong-un, the latest in a dynasty of dictators who have ruled that unfortunate country since the takeover by his grandfather, Kim-Il-sung, in 1948.  Many of the North Koreans are starving because the primary mission of that communist country has been to build up it’s military and confront it’s nearest non-communist neighbors, South Korea and Japan.  Kim Jong-un controls a budding nuclear arsenal, and a formidable ground army with more than 150,000 cannons aimed at his southern neighbor and the 35,000 American troops serving on the so-called “demilitarized zone” south of the 38th parallel.  He also is developing a series of ballistic missiles with ever increasing range capabilities.  Now, they can reach South Korea and Japan.  Soon, they will have intercontinental range to reach the United States.

Will the North Korean Generals make the same mistake the German ones did in 1939?  Or, will they decide to remove this threat to the very survival of their country?  From the time of the Clinton administration, and the attempts of his Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to negotiate an elimination of North Korea’s budding nuclear program in the 1990’s to the feckless behavior of the Obama administration for the last eight years, we have allowed this threat to fester and grow.  If China can’t influence the North Korean military to stage a coup and remove Kim Jong-un from power, we are headed down a very dangerous road.  The free world simply can’t ignore this growing threat.  It could be 1939 de ja vu.