Yep, and it’s a total coincidence that any time a country drops the petrodollar and begins trading oil in another currency, they’re either invaded by the U.S. or a coup of plucky “freedom fighters” deposes the government and begins trading in petrodollars again…
I think your definition of “carpet-bombing” and mine might be different. What’s your source for that?
You’re right, that should read “cluster-bombing.” The cluster-bombs we sell to them despite their being a war crime under international law.
Either way, the schoolchildren, hospital patients, mosque attendees, and market shoppers that they intentionally target remain just as dead, and the famine and cholera epidemic will reach genocidal proportions if the blockade isn’t listed.
I’m admittedly a bit fuzzy on matters of international law (and tend to not give them much weight) but neither USA nor Saudi Arabia appear to be party to the CCM. Is there some other international law I should be aware of?
A few questions.
How is North Korea’s nuclear program going to “royally challenge American regional supremacy?” China has been a nuclear power since the mid 1960s. And yet the United States and China still have military tension. This hasn’t stopped China from trying to create artificial islands and it hasn’t stopped the United States from militarily challenging that assertion. Do you think that a nuclear NK is going to chase the US out of the peninsula?
For truly like the 10th time, if you believe that NK is logically becoming a nuclear power to prevent the United States from “attack[ing] or even seriously undermin[ing]” NK, please tell me why it was necessary to do it now, since the United States hasn’t made an attempt to attack NK over the last 64 years? Your assertion that this logical and just course of action for the security of NK isn’t at all convincing in light of the fact that the US has made no attempt to attack NK despite numerous provocation, and in fact the American military presence in SK has steadily declined since the 1950s.
Lastly, would you care to address my earlier point that you ignored, that the US attacking NK with the 23,000 troops in county now is completely and utterly ridiculous?
Thanks in advance.
Yes, absolutely. If for no other reason than it will seriously annoy the Chinese if you need a hard-nosed pragmatic reason. It would also seriously hamper military operations if you need another. They would be weighing these heavily if we were seriously considering a first strike or launching an offensive operation at the time and place of our choosing.
The irony here is you don’t seem to realize who will actually be militarily challenged. It won’t be the US, it will be China. You don’t seem to understand that, but the Chinese certainly do. Every time the North Koreans do another test it’s a direct challenge to China, as well as another straw on the camels back of keeping the OTHER powers in the region nuclear-free. At some point, Japan might decide they need nuclear weapons…or, at a minimum that they would like the US to station some of its nuclear weapons there. Oh, this is a hugely unpopular thing right now and has been since the end of WWII, but attitudes are slowly eroding under this constant North Korea provocation. South Korea is another case. Both getting nuclear weapons would erode China’s regional monopoly of the things. In addition, at a time when the US was actually starting to pull back from the region, this has once again focused us there…again, to the detriment of China.
Also, China loses face, regionally every time North Korea tests a weapon at this point, because it underscores the fact that China actually doesn’t control North Korea nor can they really effectively reign them in. Finally, there is a non-zero chance that things could go badly wrong, from the Chinese perspective…and the odds are pretty high at this point that something will go badly wrong for them, considering that maintaining the status quo is their actual goal, that and having the US quietly back away from the region. The number of things that could change the status quo are mounting in the region.
That’s right. China has been a credible nuclear power since the 1960s and at no time since has the United States made implicit threats to destroy China in the way that Clinton did to North Korea in the mid 1990s, and we certainly haven’t threatened fire and fury. That ship has sailed. We can no longer threaten to destroy China with military power. We can destabilize China through non-political means, but that would invite a host of problems, and China has been our ATM and loan officer for a while now. China has been as much of a partner as a rival, so it enjoys a unique space in that regard.
I do get the sense - especially with the Trump administration - that our view of China is rapidly changing, and with it, our treatment of China is sure to change as well. This administration clearly views China not as a partner, but as a competitor, and there seems to be a lot less ambiguity in this respect.
Going back to the issue of nukes and the islands, if US - China relations continue on their present trajectory, then I full expect a confrontation at some point. And our current rift with the North Koreans cannot be untied from our view of China (Russia is a great asterisk given this administration’s ties to Putin). There’s always the possibility that the United States and China could have a non-military and even a military confrontation over any number of differences that exist between us. A military confrontation over China’s island building could definitely happen, and if it did, it would not necessarily lead to a nuclear war. Having nuclear weapons doesn’t preclude any and all types of military skirmishes. Russia could have skirmishes with NATO forces, and yet the probability of nuclear war with Russia would still be rather low, I would think. The context has to be considered.
The context makes the North Korean situation dangerous. North Korea’s regime believes it is a state under siege. It is being strangled by political isolation and sanctions. Even if it establishes a modest but credible arsenal of 10-15 long range nuclear weapons, just having them isn’t enough. The provocations will continue, because just having nuclear weapons and being able to defend itself against an attack is not what Kim Jung Un really wants. What he wants is to be recognized as a state with territorial integrity and political legitimacy. It wants the pressure taken off of its regime, and that’s going to be a very hard sell from America’s point of view, because applying pressure to regimes that we don’t approve of has been part of the post-1945 operations manual for how to utilize our power. What I’m saying is that one side is going to have to given in first, and chances are, if the North Korean regime doesn’t just collapse due to internal forces (a revolution, a military coup, etc), then the United States is going to have to agree - in earnest - to roll back sanctions and other forms of pressure on the regime. I could see it happening if we had someone like Obama working with a more Bernie Sanders-dominated congress, but I don’t know if I would even see Hillary Clinton agreeing to that stance, and I sure as hell don’t see Donald Trump agreeing to it. Not that Trump isn’t capable of using Nixonian diplomacy - I think he might actually be capable of that, believe it or not - but the problem with a North Korean detente is getting to that point in the first place. It’s going to be a hard sell to people inside and outside the Pentagon to get them to agree that North Korea can be allowed to have nuclear weapons. Japan, which has a long and complicated history with both Koreas, might have something to say about that as well.
I’ve already address this question before and I’m glad to address it again.
The short answer is that it has always been understood that the United States would always be able to walk away from that fight relatively unhurt. Not so for South Korea or Japan, but we would walk away, most likely, having completely leveled North Korea in an awesome display of power. Of course that would come at a cost: global markets would crash. The United States could well become the object of scorn for people in the region and the world over. But at the end of the day, the U.S. doesn’t want that to happen; it’s the perception that matters. Being able to convey that virtual reality to North Korea is important. KJL getting long-range nuclear capabilities takes away an important dimension in the projection of American power, which is the ability to walk away from such a confrontation unscathed. As I’ve said before, there are two ways to look at this: some can view it as a turning point and accept this as the new normal and calibrate foreign policy accordingly - that’s one response. The other is the Dick Cheney/John Bolton/Don Rumsfeld on steroids response - or the Douglas MacArthur response. And that response is, crush the enemy before he has the capability to fight back.
What? You mean American perceptions of losing potentially thousands of US troops in Korea? This is not necessarily a problem. All Washington has to do is to influence how Americans perceive this conflict. If Americans believe that Donald Trump was genuinely insane and went from a tweet storm to a hot war, well that would be one thing. But that’s not likely the case. The reality is that Americans already perceive the North Korean threat. All you need to consider is the 38 minutes of terror we witnessed in Hawaii just a few days ago. The seed is already planted inside of our heads: Kim Jung Un is a maniac who cannot be reasoned with and it is up to America to remove him regardless of the consequences to the hundreds of millions who live in his proximity. If that is how the conflict is framed - and we have very strong evidence that it would be framed that way - then 23,000 dead American troops are a drop in the bucket.
I know most people reading this probably think what I’ve written borders on conspiracy theory, but history and human psychology shows that it’s all very real.
You aren’t actually answering the question he’s asking you…and your answer does lose you some credibility points.
So, trying to figure out how this answer fits into the context of the question asked you. The US didn’t attack for all those years because…we understood we could, without much risk to us (but risk to our allies), but chose not to because we were content to just know we could destroy NK any time? Is that what you are saying? And now…we can’t attack because NK could get lucky and hit one of our cities with nukes? 
Of all the answers you could have given (you could have, for instance, talked about how the Soviet Union and China have shielded NK and acted as a deterrent toward the US for much of that time, or talked about the US strategy of isolation and sanctions, or even the threat the NK’s have held over Seoul) you instead went with this seemingly bizarre answer?
Eh, sailing a carrier battle group through the Taiwan Strait seems to have been a bit of an implicit threat. And they didn’t quite use the words “fire and fury” at the time (Clinton lacks Trump’s showmanship), but WaPo described the diplomatic tension like this:
I think you make some good points here, and I agree that North Korea is presenting some problems for China. Going back to something I said in a previous post, China and the US have been both competitors but also partners over the last two to three decades. China’s always trying to preserve that delicate balance between pushing back against what it sees as too much American (and allied) influence in the region and yet preserving the economic partnership that has lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of abject poverty and created a middle class. It’s a balance that’s been harder to strike mainly due to the pressures that the Kim regime is feeling. China on one hand understands how the sanctions and pressure on Kim’s regime are creating a desperate situation in North Korea, so on one hand, the Chinese would probably wish that sanctions were loosened. On the other hand, the Chinese also understand that the provocations have raised the perceptions of threat with their trading partners: the US, Japan, and South Korea. The unpredictability of these provocations, as you say, embarrasses China.
I also agree that the situation could easily lead to a military build-up by Japan. I haven’t kept up with Japan’s politics as much as I used to, but Abe Shinzo has always had nationalistic and militaristic impulses and I suspect that he’s now empowering other militarists to feel less bashful of having similarly hawkish positions. I don’t know if I would say that the US was actually pulling back from the region - that’s debatable. Perhaps in some of the more obvious ways (i.e. military personnel), yes, we had been, but we’ve still used a lot of our economic and political levers and that’s what North Korea has objected to.
North Korea absolutely represents a challenge for China, but the bigger headache is Trump’s nationalism. And this is another factor that contributes to my belief that a war with North Korea is more likely than in the past – I wouldn’t say that our chances are 90% or anything like that, but certainly and credibly higher than at any time I can recall. The reasoning is, the more that we treat China not as a partner but rather, as a competitor, then the more likely it is that the United States behaves independently of China’s influences and concerns.
For what it’s wroth, I think a war would still be an epic disaster from our vantage point too – I’m not saying any of this talk of war is rational. Much of it is absolutely irrational. But I’m saying that people in positions of power make irrational decisions all the time, and one of the reasons for this is the assumption that they have more power than they actually do in reality. People in power - particular if they possess disproportionate economic, political, and raw military power - tend to overestimate the value of that power, and they overestimate what they can achieve with it. And of course, they are often blind to the possibilities of tangential consequences. I see very real signs that this administration in particular is susceptible to calamitous errors in judgment.
I wasn’t sure what his angle was - it could be ‘ridiculous’ for any number of reasons. Reading it again, I suppose he’s suggesting that we don’t have enough ground troops to invade North Korea and that the chances of a war with North Korea are low until such time as there is a massive military build-up. I’ve already address that, too: it’s entirely possible to have a massive war without a massive build-up. A massive build-up of equipment and personnel (a la 2002-3 in the Persian Gulf) would send the signal to North Korea that it’s about to be attacked. It is not going to wait to allow that to happen. Lessons learned from our adventures in the Middle East.
But I don’t think the Russian shield has to be said - it reinforces the point that I’ve made here again and again, which is that the United States isn’t going to attack if it believes that it might face nuclear retaliation. There’s nothing bizarre about the response at all.
People use the words grave consequences all the time. I remember the Taiwan “crisis” and it wasn’t much of a crisis at all. China never seriously considered an assault on Taiwan.
China is both a partner AND a competitor, however. And it’s reflected more in their attitude towards us than ours towards them. China has been the one pushing our regional partners (as well as neutrals like Vietnam…really, every country with the possible exception of Russia that has a border with China). Ironically, the US had been pulling back in the region through successive presidents until first China started pushing their regional ambitions and then North Korea decided they weren’t getting enough attention.
I don’t see what North Korea is doing as any sort of challenge towards America, not even towards whatever “Trump’s nationalism” is. It’s more playing into Trump’s hands as it’s a distraction he can use to try and blow smoke up our collective asses and muddy the waters away from all of the domestic shit he’s gotten himself into. To me, what Trump is doing is straight out of his own book of plays wrt business…threaten and bluster in an effort to gain some negotiating or bargaining chip that can be used to make a better deal. That goes for both his actions towards North Korea and even more so with his actions towards China. He’s a carrot and stick and deal guy, and that’s what he’s playing at, IMHO. War isn’t the goal, and it’s pretty obvious that we aren’t preparing for war either. What we are doing is threatening and showing the stick, i.e. our carriers and the deployment of some additional stealth aircraft to the region, and various trade and currency issues wrt China.
The issue I have is that Trump is clueless about the various balances in the region…he’s like the proverbial bull in the China shop. Even if HE doesn’t intend for there to be an actual war, he might paint the NK’s into a corner where they think it’s the only thing they can do. Or he might humiliate lil’ Kimmy into doing something stupid. Or he might overplay his hand with the Chinese, who definitely don’t want a shift in the status quo. Or someone at a lower level might simply fuck up and kick off a war. So many things could go wrong and give us all a war no one wants that it makes me shiver.
Abe Shinzo has been pushing on this for a while, and recently he’s made some headway…and it’s mainly due to the wake-up call that this has been to the Japanese people wrt provocations from North Korea. And, of course, increasing pressure from China in both the South China and East China seas as well as a couple of seemingly worthless islands and definitely not worthless oil. All of these continue to erode the staunch anti-military attitude of the core of the Japanese people post-war. There is also the increasing perception that the US was backing away from the region and that the various powers are going to have to step up and protect themselves. Even though right now that doesn’t seem the case, it’s the perceived greater overarching trend that a lot of folks in the region feel the US is taking.
Actually, you didn’t answer either of my simple and straightforward questions. I don’t know what’s worse, that you didn’t actually understand them, or that you understood them, didn’t have an answer of them and just started typing.
Either way, I now have a much better understanding with who I’m debating with. Not trying to be a tool, but if you have claims such as the ones your espousing, you should be able to back them up. When you can’t back them up (and you haven’t) you just look like you have an axe to grind with American foreign policy without much reason (in this particular case).
Yes, that’s exactly what he’s getting at and what he’s asking you. 24k troops were never (and aren’t) sufficient to be more than a tripwire…a show of US commitment in terms of actual boots on the ground in defense of South Korea. Not only are they insufficient as an invasion force, they aren’t trained in that way nor are they supplied or equipped in that way.
And though you think you’ve addressed this, you really haven’t. There is no way to have a massive war without a build up. Flat out, you are simply wrong. With what the US has in theater now, we COULD do a surgical strike at, say, the command structure and maybe some of the nuclear preparation and testing facilities, perhaps a few raids on their power and communications infrastructure. But we couldn’t follow through because there aren’t enough bombs, missiles or replacement planes and pilots to do so. We couldn’t invade in any way, shape or form with what we and the South Korean’s have there now…nor are the South Koreans calling up or positioning their military, so it would be months before they could shift to offensive operations from their current stance…and a lot longer before the US could get enough in theater to do much of anything except defend.
As for lessons learned from the ME, the actual lesson we learned is don’t try an invasion of even a 3rd rate power on the cheap. It’s funny, but the actual lesson is that if you are going to invade, do it full out not with the half-measures and on a budget that the Bush administration tried. And North Korea is going to be a tougher nut to crack than Iraq ever was.
This is the point of departure. My analysis doesn’t assume that military action is predicated on our ability to invade and hold North Korea; the United States could light North Korea on fire and watch it burn.
I’ve answered them. The problem is, this conflict has dimensions you’re not familiar with, so you out of ignorance you make the assumption that I’m not answering your questions.
Nice goalpost moving there. Where did I say anything about UK or France? or “since the early 1900s”? I just said that that the Iraq war by the Shrub was supposed by many to be about oil, but it turned out not to be.
It turned out being about the Shrub getting even for his Daddy and his cronies getting rich.
Maybe or maybe not. Kim is already currently “seriously annoying the Chinese” they might welcome some issues if it leads to long term stability in the region. Especially as they could then make NK a puppet state.