Kim Jong Un is "trying to get the rest of the world to bribe" North Korea so it will not build up its nuclear arsenal — a tactic that has worked under every previous administration, former federal prosecutor John Yoo told Newsmax TV.
In an interview Wednesday with "Newsmax Now" host Bill Tucker, the law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and former deputy assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice, called the North Korean leader "like a kid whose parents are ignoring him."
"So when the world ignores him, when the world doesn't pay attention to him, that's when he gets desperate," Yoo said. "That's when he starts making threats."
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But his threats are little more than "trying to get the rest of the world to bribe" Pyongyang.
"That's what worked under [Barack] Obama," he said. "I hate to say that's what worked under [George W.] Bush, and it's worked under [Bill] Clinton, so they're using nuclear weapons as blackmail on the rest of the world."
"If all you care about is staying in power as hard as you can, regardless of the health of your population and the future of your nation, then you want to have a nuclear weapon because you think that's the ultimate guarantee of your security," Yoo added.
To whether the reasoning is rational, Yoo said "based on his own way of thinking, he's rational."
"He thinks that he can go around and threaten the rest of the world and get the world to pay him money," he said. "That's essentially what he wants because his country has no resources left. They've just gone through a terrible famine and so that's really what's going on."
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