Left Flank

The only way to be optimistic about DPRK's willingness to negotiate away its only nuclear bargaining chip this year will be to pray for the Kim regime's collapse. It's cold solace. Victor Cha is a bit more positive.

Cha, a scholar at Georgetown University, said optimism has never been the driving force in U.S. diplomacy with Pyongyang.

"People who support the policy now don't support it because they're optimistic. They're as pessimistic as the strongest hawk on North Korea, but we still have to fashion some sort of diplomatic process that gets (the North Koreans) in a position where they're forced to make decisions they don't want to make," he said.

I could hope for massive pundit battles and body slams, like Marcus Noland's.

«This is about as close to a Nazi regime in terms of its internal practices as exists in the world today,» he said. «It's outrageous that the director of the New York Philharmonic would [make such a statement] before this trip. I think you have to at least admit that there are troubling aspects to this regime and [consider] how your activity fits into these. To just dismiss it is outrageous.»

Waiting long for such sane arguments, however, could be futile.

Fortunately, saving me from killing myself, there's a more useful endeavor at hand: understanding the Gratuitous Game Theory of Official Support. Now, the only aspect I deplore is math. Except for counting money, I generally fall asleep after viewing too many numbers. It's a grave handicap, but I fight it to master economics.

The South Korean Ministry of Unification has a dominant strategy to lend/give/invest in North Korea for ostensibly two reasons: 1. If the MoU does not, their raison d'etre goes away.  2. South Korea will ultimately see a payoff if a development strategy works in the DPRK.

Contracting with North Korea, however, is essentially a prisoner's dilemma (see chart above), and North Korea has the ability to cooperate or defect.  However, the North Koreans have rational expectations, so they know the Ministry of Unification has a dominant strategy to cooperate.

Therefore the Nash equilibrium is for the South to keep cooperating and for the North to keep defecting.  In a repeated game, cooperation evolves over time as trust develops and defection decreases.  Because of South Korea's dominant strategy,however, the North never has an incentive to cooperate–so we end up with an «anti-folk theorem» where defection is the only incentive compatible outcome over time.

if Joshua at OFK is a canary, then this might be the rational discipline that sees us through to the better end.