The NYTimes The Daily podcast this week had an interesting explanation of this situation. N. Korea is not really a a proxy state, the best you can call it is a

The NYTimes The Daily podcast this week had an interesting explanation of this situation. N. Korea is not really a a proxy state, the best you can call it is a rogue proxy state. It's not like it doesn't extort China too. It knows China doesn't want instability on it's border. Funnily enough the rest of the world thinks China can snap it's fingers and get the situation fixed up. The rest of the world is perplexed why it's not happening. The analogy they made is to Israel. The whole world thinks that Israel is a proxy of the US. The rest of the world doesn't understand why the U.S just can't get Israel to stop building settlements. In fact when the U.S makes a public stink about it, Israel builds new settlements out of spite. So the term is ... rogue proxy. I believe this is the episode: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/podcasts/the-daily/north-korea-sabotage-and-diplomacy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/podcasts/the-daily/north-... . Not a 100% sure about it, since I listened to it in my podcast feed and just did a search for it.