If that strategy sounds familiar, it should. As North Korea-watcher Adrian Hong put it to me recently, Assad can easily “adopt the North Korea playbook” and keep his chemical weapons but pretend to be forever on the verge of disarming, all the while continuing his bad behavior. The thing that has made this strategy so successful for North Korea is that it can get away with almost anything: global weapons proliferation, sprawling gulags, shelling South Korean civilians for fun. But the world is so concerned about North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction — nuclear as well as chemical — that nobody wants to upset the interminably protracted negotiations over rolling them back.
Almost two years ago, when the fighting in Syria was still mostly government troops firing at unarmed civilians, U.S. special representative to Syria Frederick Hof told a congressional committee that Syria would become “Pyongyang on the Levant.” That was before anyone thought Assad would actually dip into his chemical arsenal — or even that fighting would escalate into a full-blown civil war with 100,000 dead, 2 million refugees and 4.5 million internally displaced people.
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