This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Sunday, November 27th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

North Korea's missile tests are a regular source of anxiety, but it's important not to let the country's

saber rattling turn into a high-stakes cycle of increasing belligerence.

Cato's Eric Gomez details the current state of play. I don't mean to downplay the stakes

here because whenever North Korea engages in some sort of a nuclear test or

shenanigans as you've called it.

You know, I think it makes pretty much every thinking person of the world think,

ewoo, that's not good but it it feels like and tell me if I'm wrong it feels like

this happens when there are other much larger prevailing news events and it's almost as if North Korea is

signaling don't forget about us we're still here. It's tempting to think that I think

it's it's more the cycle now that we find ourselves in has more to do with North Korea having this plan, right, in in 2021, I believe at the Party Congress, Kim Jong-un sets out this like five-year plan.

And on the nuclear front, he's like, we're going to test tactical nuclear weapons they haven't done that yet

We're going to test new types of systems we're going to field them and after this he kind of He he does some stuff, he does a few tests, but it's kind of relatively short, or relatively low frequency.

And I think what we're seeing over the last few months is that you have this dynamic brewing where the U.S. and South Korea are saying, okay, we want to get back to these big military exercises we used to do.

We stop doing them to try and give diplomacy a chance with the North Koreans,

and now the North Koreans are latching on to these resumption of exercises to ramp up their own activities and their own testing.

And you find yourselves in this spiral situation.

So I don't think it's Kim's asking for attention,

but it is definitely this policy issue that

is clearly not that a U.S US number one priority right now in foreign policy and it yeah like you said it kind of brings people attention

temporarily while the tests are going on and then brings people

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