The North Korea Thread

My 2 cents:

This is a perfect example of why we shouldn't meddle in other nations business and conflicts. For decades the West has massively supported South Korea and arming them to the teeth while constantly threatening to end the North Korean regime.

What did the US expected? That North Korea would just roll over and wait for the US to "liberate" them? North Korea investing massively in their defense and ICBM nukes capable of striking the US was very predictable and now here we are.

Best course of action?
It would have been to let them settle this among themselves, even if it meant the north won that war. In the end, when the people choose to get rid of that regime, they would have done so themselves. Instead, the US gave reasons for North Koreans to keep supporting that nutjob.

Blame China?
If the US was out of that conflict, perhaps it would have been China who would have fixed the whole thing as they don't like unstable neighbors. However, with the US trying to control all their neighboring nations and putting bases and troops in those countries while sending aircraft carriers in the China sea, why would they be in any hurry to remove North Korea regime? They know that it would be occupied by a US controlled regime with US troops moving on their borders. Right now, they are just trying to contain this, but it's not in their interest to see South Korea control the north.

Worse?
If you are to arm South Korea to the teeth and deploy all that military might, they should have used it before the North was ever in a position to develop ICBM technology and nukes. The US inaction (both democrats and republicans) backfired big time and will be another testament to another US failure on world affairs.

 

@Robert Borden one of the lessons of Iraq is that we will only attack nations without nukes.

 

And Libya, the biggest mistake Gaddafi made was to give up its nuclear program. He would still be in power if he did not.

I can not blame Iran if they "cheat" on the deal and start building nuclear bombs.

 

I don't think the President wrote that tweet, as it is grammatical and all the words are correctly spelled. So I'm back to worrying.

 

North Korea

 

If you mean that the US are about to bombard them, I think you're in for a huge disappointment.

 

I'm pretty sure that not even Trump is stupid enough to do that.

 

You just made me suffer from a pseudobulbar affect attack but I hope you're right!

 

I had to look that up, but I get it.

 

To be fair...I hade to look it up too!

 

Raise yer hand if you remember how "gettin' tough" worked in the early 2000s!

Trump’s Korea Policy is a Fast-Forward, Stupider Version of Bush’s

But there’s another layer of this – what I referred to earlier as the fast-forward version of the 2001-03 era. In the Post’s Daily 202 morning newsletter we find this paragraph as part of the explanation of Trump’s naivete.

"The past three presidents have tried to negotiate, only to learn that Pyongyang can never be trusted. Reflecting the hubris of someone who believes he alone can fix things, Trump’s “it will not happen” tweet came two months after Barack Obama warned him privately that North Korea would likely be the single most urgent problem he confronted as president. Several aides from the last administration also told their incoming counterparts that the missile program should be their top national security priority."

The first sentence is a major distortion of the the last two-decades-plus of history. The last three administrations are Clinton, Bush and Obama. The current situation dates back to the 1993-94 North Korean nuclear crisis under President Clinton which eventually led to something called the ‘Agreed Framework‘. I am glossing over a vast amount of detail but that agreement and its elaborations over the 1990s amounted to the US and its allies providing technology and various forms of aid to North Korea in exchange for freezing its nuclear programs. The American right viewed the deal as “appeasement” and an example of perceived American weakness abroad. North Korea was neither a normal state or a very trustworthy one (true enough). The US, most Republicans argued, shouldn’t be in the business of essentially paying the North Koreans protection money as a reward for their aggressive behavior.

This was the essence of the debate through much of the late 1990s. President Bush ran on ending the deal and bringing the North Koreans to heel. Then in late 2002, a US delegation went to Pyongyang to confront the North Koreans with what the US claimed was evidence of cheating on the deal by creating a uranium enrichment program. (The original deal had dealt with the North Koreans’ plutonium cycle.) The quality of that intelligence has always been controversial. But that doesn’t mean it was wrong. One Clinton era State Department official later said that the Clinton administration had had at least suspicions about a uranium program as far back as 1998.

This gets us back into the highly complicated and messy history of the Agreed Framework. By the late 1990s, the North Koreans complained the US had not followed through on a promised normalization of relations between the two countries. They also claimed the US hadn’t delivered all the promised aid. At least some of this was the case since the Republican Congress worked to scuttle the deal via its control of the appropriations process. Basically, they wouldn’t make the money available.

For more details than this, you have to read up on the history and make your own judgments. It was messy. There was plenty of evidence to suggest North Korean bad faith or at least failure to live up to agreements. There was also a good bit of evidence that the US didn’t live up to its agreements, in part because the US government was divided. It also quite possible, even likely that the North Koreans did start a uranium enrichment program. In my mind, looking back on it, it’s not like retrospective arguments about whether Israel or the Palestinians killed the ‘peace process’. Both sides have at least plausible narratives arguing that the other side operated in bad faith and/or did not live up to their side of the bargain.

But the key is this. As of 2002, the North Koreans had no active nuclear weapons program. The Bush administration used the intelligence about a uranium enrichment program as a confirmation of its doubts about the Agreed Framework and proceeded to scuttle the deal over the course of 2003. In 2006, North Korea detonated its first nuclear weapon.

My take on this history is that the Bush administration, not without some reason, said you don’t reward aggressive behavior. We’re going to get tough with North Korea and stop paying protection money. And they did get tough – to the extent that getting tough means saying mean things and showing resolve. But the Bush folks eventually came to grips with the reality the Clinton team had confronted which was that the US had no military options it deemed viable. Could the US invade and overthrow the North Korean government? Sure. But only at the cost of probably hundreds of thousands of lives, the risk of a conflict with China and a lot else. So the Clinton administration had a messy and unlovely ‘deal’ with the North Koreans that kept North Korea non-nuclear through the 1990s. The Bush team “got tough” and the outcome was a North Korea with substantial nuclear arsenal and a expanding missile program. Beyond the ego gratification of ‘being tough’ and ‘showing resolve’ it is difficult to imagine any policy producing worse results than what the Bush policy produced. One can debate how much better the Clinton administration results were. But you simply can’t argue with the fact that they were better than what happened under Bush. Again, North Korea not having nuclear weapons versus having them. There’s just no getting around that.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trumps-korea-policy-is-a-fast-forward-stupider-version-of-bushs

 

At least until the first missile lands in Alaska.

As for Hawaii, they get what they deserve for trying to thwart Trump.

 

If a NK missile lands in Alaska, then it will require extraordinary restraint to not retaliate massively.

If the Uner is actually crazy enough to drop a nuke on Denali, then that response will also be massively nuclear, and we will almost certainly wipe NK off the map. Or at least their citizens and crappy commie buildings.

 

Don't they have to be able to lately deliver a nuke on their bottle rocket? Don't think they're there yet.

I've heard some talking heads opine that Kim DumFook may not be as insane as we all assume. Might be amenable to a carrot...which he'll then toss to an adoring crowd who will tear each other limb from limb to eat it.

 

Which is fine for most Americans because they don't live in Alaska. It's expendable

 

Alaskans are just coastal elites to me.

 

US to ban travel to North Korea.

BBCLINK

I'm ok with this. I don't really see how tourism to N. Korea is beneficial at all other than provided a small source of finances to the N.Korean leadership and also potentially easy access to human hostages they can use to try and bride the United States over.

 

For anyone in need of a different point of view

 

He probably watched Game of Thrones on Sunday