North Korea Shuts DMZ Out of Spite

North Korea, which can't feed its own people and relies on the humanitarian aid to feed the nation more often than not, has decided to shut the border with South Korea. If you're wondering who this will affect more, the answer is clearly going to be the North Korean people, though the AP thinks that this will affect a joint industrial park just inside North Korea:

The military's chief delegate to inter-Korean talks informed his South Korean counterpart that the North will "restrict and cut off" cross-border routes next month, state-run Korean Central News Agency said.

Analysts called it a pointed political move designed to humiliate Seoul by hobbling a joint industrial park in the city of Kaesong, just across the border, that has served as a beacon of hope for reconciliation.

Relations between the two Koreas — separated by troops, tanks and one of the world's most heavily armed borders since a three-year war that ended in a truce in 1953 — have been frosty since South Korea's President Lee Myung-bak took office in February.

Lee pledged to be tough with communist North Korea, an abrupt departure from his liberal predecessors' decade-long policy of fostering reconciliation with aid and other concessions.

How exactly does this humiliate the South Koreans? The South doesn't need the North to remain an economic power in the region, and if the South could devote more energy to economic matters than retaining a significant military to deter the North, it would be an even bigger economic power.

The North's leadership has repeatedly chosen militarism and collectivism over freedom and liberty. If anything, this is a repudiation of the Sunshine policy rather than trying to actually defeat the North by shepherding the economic collapse of the government in Pyongyang. The North will continue to muddle along and provoke crisis after crisis to secure aid and fuel shipments, and the people of the North suffer.