I'm Tom Batscher with Gordon Chang, my colleague and co-host and we're very pleased to have Bruce

Bechtel here to comment on North Korea,

North Korea in the Gaza War and the Hezbollah conflict

in the Middle East,

but North Korea also in the Korean Peninsula

is making what appear to be fresh threats.

Gordon's with me. Gordon, what did exactly did Kim Jong-un say and is it a game change?

In December the Workers Party held an important plenum and during that time there was a rhetorical change basically saying South Korea was no longer part of the same blood as the North Korean people, it was an enemy.

And in conjunction with this, two prominent American academics, Robert Carlin and Siegfried Hecker, have written an article on the 38th

North site saying that Kim Jong-un has made a strategic decision to go to war.

Not everyone agrees with that, but clearly there has been a change in the way, at least

rhetorically, North Korea is looking at the South.

Professor Bactyl, the U.S. deployment at the

U.S. deployment in Korea continues. The Korean president, President Eun,

has recently visited in the United States at Camp David in a three amigos, the President of the United States,

the Prime Minister of Japan, and the President of South Korea.

The threats by North Korea, are they credible, are they for domestic use?

Is it imaginable that North Korea would take on at least those three allies, plus others?

Well, I, you know, that's a great question, John.

And I think it is all rhetoric.

Again, this is rhetoric in response to some things that they really don't like that we've done.

One is accusing them of what the three of us were just talking about with Hamas.

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