Since China doesn’t recognize the crimes committed against itself by the CCP, I think its sheer hypocracy to expect Japan to recognize their crimes towards China. But they should do so for the rest of Asia; especially South Korea.
I’m not going to play “heads I win tails you lose.” When the US uses restraint, you’d say they are powerless. If the US takes action they’re thugs and bullies.
It’s not that at all. The regional power is China. NK is also a client state of China. Russia als has a border and some influence.
The USA can wander up and down the coast all year long with Trump’s armada, no one believes it has any power to act meaningfully in the region.
Sure the USA can commit war crimes by attacking a sovereign state but it won’t have a friend in the world outside Japan, and will likely face harsh UN sanctions.
Do you really think SK wants the game show host to act?
Best Trump sticks to talking wind and piss.
The danger with crying North Korean wolf all the time is that, like the Doomsday Clock, now people can’t pay attention even when the danger is realer now than before. We’ve been hearing rumors about war involving North Korea for decades now.
The real threat is the anonymous sale or outright gift of a nuclear weapon to a suicidal group who would happily kill themselves using it.
What’s the diplomatic response to that?
I agree completely, and even echoed the same upstream. It’s not so much that KJU is suicidal, it’s who he transfers the technology to.
It should be clear, to even the most casual observer, that he’s not able to distinguish between a reasonable person and an irrational one.
I don’t think it can be accurately characterized as “no one believes it has any power to act meaningfully in the region”. More like “it can’t act militarily without severe repercussions”. It wouldn’t shock me if one day in the next few years this administration decided that those repercussions aren’t as severe as the consequences of allowing the North Korea government to continue to exist as a governing body. And it would shock me if we lost all of our friends except Japan over it.
I believe the response would be a military one, not a diplomatic one, and targeted at the seller / gifter of the nuclear weapon.
I don’t think anyone could rule out sales to terrorists but it would seem - at least to me - that the cost benefit ratio would be limited from NK’s point of view. First of all, terrorist organizations have limited resources - even more limited than that of piss poor NK. Hence, not much money to gain from sales.
But more than that, Jung Un also knows that this is a red line – not only for the United States but for China and Russia as well. After all, both Russia and China have their own very real terrorist threats within their own backyards. So whereas Russia and China might be willing to throw some support to NK otherwise, there would be little sympathy from China and Russia if Kim Jung Un started arming Islamic radicals and found themselves in the cross hairs of the US military. The United States would still be viewed as a problem, but Kim Jung Un - who’s already a pain in China and Russia’s ass as things stand now - would be an even bigger one.
The whole idea is internet nonsense. It’s entirely missing the point of what China and NK are doing
We, as a powerless nation, wait to be educated.
#thiswillbefun
ISIS had hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from oil field revenue and waged war against the assets of 3 nations for YEARS. There are plenty of state funded terrorist groups who could buy a weapon if it was made available.
I’m not saying that ISIS or Al Qaida don’t have enough money to buy nukes, but why haven’t we yet heard of North Korea selling weapons to terrorists? One possibility is that they already have and we just don’t know about it - possible I suppose but highly unlikely. Or maybe it’s because the dangers of getting caught selling or even planning to sell even one to ISIS would be a green light to obliterate North Korea and whatever money they get from selling a nuke or two wouldn’t be worth that risk. There are some red lines that even North Korea wouldn’t be wise to cross.
Selling a nuke to non-state militia isn’t even something that sounds wise from North Korea’s own point of view. Not that they’re in danger of being attacked by Islamic militants but once a nuke’s on the black market, there’s no controlling who gets it and what they do with it - I could be wrong and Kim Jung Un might be stupid, but I doubt it. I think he understands the dangers there. What’s perhaps more likely is a rogue scientist secretly working with a militia to develop such weapons in exchange for a secret pay day. However that’s not a very likely scenario in the case of North Korea. A rogue scientist from Pakistan, on the other hand…well that might be actually plausible.
I’m not worried about Kim Jung Un’s stupidity. I’m worried about his sanity.
probably because NKorea doesn’t yet have enough spare nukes. They’re still testing them, and only have a few. But in 3 or 4 years, when NKorea has , say, 50 bombs–they will happily sell one or two to ISIS.
Kim would love to see a nuke explode on Wall Street.
Sorry, I missed that someone replied to me.
Let he who is without sin, eh? Turns out politics doesn’t work like that; you can be pissed at other nations even if your own record is not squeaky clean.
But more specifically, in discussing the animosity between China and Japan we mostly mean in public opinion.
And the Chinese public remembers and resents much of the injustices perpetrated by the communist party. So not really any hypocrisy there.
That’s the thing about stalemates. You have to learn to live with and contain them, just as the world did when the USSR, China, India and Pakistan got the bomb. Which is why Kim is busy making more emollient manoeuvres to South Korea at the moment.
I’ve never seen even the slightest evidence of Kim’s lack of sanity. This is nothing but an American political trope.
Trump, on the other hand…
So much of this tread is a variation of “don’t worry, Kim isn’t crazy, he just wants to ensure that the US doesn’t come after him.” And posters use that supposed logic as proof that he won’t use or sell nuclear weapons and that he’s actually quite sound.
But this is a false premise. The United States wasn’t coming after him, or actively trying to depose him.
There was an uneasy, yet lasting peace that has been going on long before most of us on this board were born with the close of the Korean War. Since then there is a long list of American military killed by NK. NK captured an American warship and held and tortured its crew for a year. And still no war or significant effort to overthrow the regime in all that time.
So what did NK do in this era of relative peace in the peninsula? It began a nuclear weapons program. That action has brought UN sanctions beginning in the early 1990s and has increased in scope. It’s had significant impact on the people of NK. It’s caused political turmoil for NK. And it’s forced its one true ally to alter it’s commitment to NK.
So now there is sabre rattling, and NK politically, and economically is enduring hardships now more than ever. And why? To ensure that the United States isn’t going to do something that it had no desire or intent to do in the first place. To ensure that the United States didn’t start a war again, that it halted in 1953.
So how is this evidence of a stable regime? How is this evidence that Kim “isn’t crazy?” Kim hasn’t realized any net gain due to his acquisition of nuclear weapons, but his country is certainly is worse shape for it. I think he just wanted a bigger world stage. That’s what he’s gotten for all of this (and the worlds) troubles.
This meme that he needed nuclear weapons to keep the big bad US from toppling him is complete and utter nonsense, and doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny. So nether does the belief that he’s a rational actor due to his weapons program.
I think a case could be made for NK’s willingness to make money on weapons sales to other nation states - Syria, Egypt, and others for instance. In fact there’s apparently evidence they’ve already done this. But these nation states all share a common fear of paramilitary forces and civilian uprisings, which is why Kim knowingly working with terrorist organizations unlikely. For one thing, Kim can get a lot more mileage dealing with other nation states, selling weapons to Iran or Syria or Saudi Arabia. Were he to start dealing with terrorists - his trading partners’ enemies - he would likely have a lot less sympathy when it comes to actions that are hostile to his regime. They would also likely stop doing any business with him. And again, North Korea, like any authoritarian state, fears paramilitaries and popular uprisings. North Korea’s own larger, more powerful neighbors would have a problem with North Korea knowingly supporting destabilizing militias. China, moreover, is potentially in a really good position to disrupt and destroy the Kim regime if it reached the conclusion that it was an intolerable threat. I’m just not convinced that North Korea would really be interested in knowingly shipping arms to militants. Now could arms fall into the wrong hands once it reaches Syria? Sure, which probably does happen, and that’s probably why North Korea’s probably limiting its shipments mostly (if not entirely) to conventional small arms. It would be in a terrible position if there were credible evidence of North Korea selling unconventional weapons to terrorists. It’s much more interested in getting a credible long-range nuclear strike capability first to repel a possible attack by the United States.