Great timing for Blaine's latest, a front-page story about North Korean sales of its minerals to raise hard currency.
US administrations have negotiated with the DPRK based on the understandable assumption that North Korea needs American help in the form of fuel oil, food or hard currency; a decade ago, one North Korean defector said that he'd seen the bodies of starved children in the streets of Pyongyang.
Blaine's story, however, says the DPRK has an estimated $2 trillion - that's trillion with a T - worth of minerals in its mountains. It sounds like any serious effort by the DPRK to mine these materials and sell them (most likely) to China could give the North Korean leadership some long-term staying power and could alter the equation with Washington.
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