North Korea’s recent rocket tests highlight this brutal regime’s ongoing threat to peace. A mere change of leadership won’t eliminate the dangers posed by the rogue state; the only long-term solution requires disappearance of the totalitarian nightmare in Pyongyang and unification of the Korean Peninsula.

That may seem unthinkable at the moment, but 27 years ago a similarly impossible reunification dissolved Communist East Germany into the prosperous, stable Federal Republic of West Germany. Co-incidentally, the statesman who guided this heroic transition just died on June 16th. Helmut Kohl served 16 supremely eventful years as German Chancellor and both presidents Bush and Clinton hailed him as “the greatest European leader in the second half of the 20th Century.”

Kohl’s example makes clear that even well-established dictatorships can dissolve as artificially divided nations join together in the name of peace and progress. May that lesson inspire hope and encouragement for the oppressed, long-suffering people of today’s North Korea.

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