Dialogue is the only option to defuse North Korea crisis

THE North Korea crisis is being analysed more intensively and from more angles with each day of mounting tension on and beyond the Korean peninsula. Yet confusion continues to reign as to the real causes of the crisis and the realistic options for dealing with it.

Among many unanswered questions surrounding the situation, the most immediate and critical is whether the crisis could escalate into war. A second is what North Korea's real motives are in pushing things to the edge of confrontation. A third is what the lasting impact will be, even absent war. Could it come to war? No one (perhaps beyond North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and US President Donald Trump and his generals) can answer that question definitively, even though it is a matter of life and death. But it is well to remember that many wars begin by "accident" when tensions are high.

It was alarming to hear Hiroshi Tanaka, former director of the Northeast Asian Department in Japan's Foreign Ministry and the man who negotiated the Japan-North Korea "Pyongyang Declaration" in 2002, say in Tokyo this week that he "cannot discount the possibility of confrontation on the Korean peninsula". Which brings us to the question of what Pyongyang's real strategy is, and how far it will go in pursuit of that strategy.