Rhetorical Analysis Of Inside North Korea, And Feeling The Drums Of War

The rising tensions between the United States and North Korea are at an all-time high, it is no news that at any second a full-scale war between these two nations could break out. The consequences of such a war are the endangerment of the lives of millions of people in multiple nations. Nicholas Kristof’s opinion piece “Inside North Korea, and Feeling the Drums of War,” published in the New York Times Sunday Review, serves as an emotional overload purposely written to warn the audience of just how tense the relations between these two Nations have become, as well as the reality of a possible catastrophic conflict between them if concessions are not drawn to ease tensions. Kristof adopts an urgent tone in his article that he uses to stir up

In the first paragraph of Kristof’s article he mentions Otto Warmbier, the American citizen that was detained in North Korea and subsequently died one week after being returned to the United States. This is certainly a pathetic appeal because it shows that North Korea does not care about morals when it comes to detaining citizens of the United States. It also leaves the audience thinking that if a war broke out between these two nations what is there to prevent them from doing inhumane acts of warfare. In speaking about the same situation Kristof says that North Korean officials offered no apology for the death of Warmbier, this is another instance of the lack of morals being displayed which further sways the audience opinion of North Korea. Kristof offers a few quotes from some of the North Koreans that he interviewed all of which bear the same tone toward the United States. One example in which Mun Hyok-Myong states “if we have to go to war, we won’t hesitate to totally destroy the United States,” (2) demonstrates that the general population of North Korea believes that they would win a war against the United States. This is certainly alarming to the reader and works as a pathetic appeal because it puts them directly into the picture. Kristof often refers back to his

Referring back to the interviews that Kristof did while in North Korea he mentions that because North Korea is perhaps the most tightly controlled country in the world, that the quotes should be seen as reflecting a government script. This works as a logic appeal because he is stating that because of how tightly controlled the country is, there is no way that the people would speak freely about their views. Another instance is where Kristof contributes growing tensions to the fact that, “hard-liners seem ascendant in both Washington and Pyongyang” (2). This is logos because it states that because neither government wants to seem weak they are not backing down, resulting in the increase in tensions. This is mentioned later in his article when he states that the demands that each country wants are unrealistic, thus they will never be met and tensions will never ease. Kristof later says, “maybe Kim himself isn’t so recklessly overconfident. But historically, one risk is that dictators come to believe their own propaganda.” Kristof is implying that Kim is not so reckless that he would just launch a nuclear weapon without good reason, but that if something happened that skyrocketed tensions he might attack with the assumption that he will come out victorious. Kristof also cites some estimations that the United States Military made in 1994 on the outcome of