succeed nef launching a satellite in the future. reporter: people expressing their absolute devotion and confidence to this country s leaders, past and present. and now, everyone is just on their way home and they are still, still coming through the streets. richard engel in pyongyang. with me now here, korea expert at georgetown university victor cha, also the asia director at the national security council, traveled to pyongyang and also the author of the new book the impossible state, north korea past and future. victor, you and i were both in north korea together. we see a very different north korea now as this young leader tries to establish his credibility, but this enormous embarrassment of a failed rocket test, another failure. the white house is suggesting that the failure was because of sanctions because they ve not been able to get advanced guidance systems that a lot of the things that they need for these tests are just not available to them any longer. i think that
north korea. i m wolf blitzer. you re in the situation room. the showdown over the payroll tax cut lasted for weeks, but the stalemate ended in a matter of minutes today after house republican leaders bowed to overwhelming pressure and gave into the democrats. today, the house approved the bill that got almost 90% of support in the senate. president obama signed it into law and the threat of a new year s day tax hire for 160 working americans is over. let s go straight to dana bash who s watching this on capitol hill. must be pretty empty. it was exciting for a few minutes today. a few minutes, underline the word minutes. look, there is a lot of relief that this battle that consumed congress in these final days is over. especially for house republicans. the house will be in order. it was john boehner s decision to back down and he backed it up by presiding over passage of a short-term tax cut that many call a gimmick. hr 3765. a bill to extend the payroll tax holida
and south korea are now hopefully going to consider that. the way that think of that is that the north koreans used our trip and our standing invitation to visit north korea, to have somebody on the scene and then turned it around once the tensions began to escalate and looked like they were going to go out of control, to use our presence to try to make a point. that point being a message to the u.s. that they wanted to talk, they wanted to get back to the table and sit down with the u.s. it seems the north koreans had a strategy from the beginning, using the threat of all-out war to reopen the door to negotiations. that s the view of jim walsh, a korea expert at m.i.t. i think one of the clues here was the fact that the north koreans did invite governor richardson and yourself to come to north korea. and i think that made it less likely that they were going to do something in the middle of that visit.
ahead with the live-fire military exercise. the north says the move will ignite war at any cost. let s turn to gordon chang for more perspective. he s a columnist for forbes.com, a korea expert and a frequent visitor on this show. good evening to you, mr. chang. are we headed for a serious conflict here? well, we could be because at this point we can t rule anything out and no scenario is implausible. i actually don t think we re going to have war at this time, because the north koreans, they will retaliate, but they might not retaliate now. their pattern really has been to retaliate in the future when the south koreans are not up on their guard, so i think that we will see something, just not in the next few days. someone sent a note to me, mr. chang, earlier saying, don, am i going to go to bed and wake up to war? well, that is possible because the south koreans will go ahead with their live fire exercises, and the north koreans will retaliate and the north koreans have been ve
another sign of thawing relations with pyongyang but now out of nowhere things could be up in the air. joining me now is enforced ecod he s a korea expert from leeds university in the u.k. first of all what do you see these latest developments how much does it mean for this much hyped sun match up between came john warner and donald trump just showed you for next week is it in jeopardy. it could be i m hopeful that it isn t i if i can respect the late call it by what your correspondent just said i don t think this came out of nowhere the north koreans always do this kind of thing they play hardball and they like to keep us guessing it was all going fall to smoothly you there for those of us stupid watching this process for a long time so it doesn t surprise me i m hoping it s just a negotiating tactic so a bump in the road just for suggested there are all the hypotheses it s possible