If he does it won’t be North Korean nukes that will be the problem…it will be the fact that the South Korean capital is a smoking crater of death due to all the North’s artillery. I can’t even imagine what the humanitarian costs would be if you factor in the collapse of the North and destruction of the South’s capital. :eek: And this leaves aside what the Chinese might do. The way things are now with the 19th congress coming up, the Chinese aren’t going to bend very easily. Xi basically can’t be seen to be weak at this time.
Hopefully, whoever is advising Trump has a clue. Oh, wait…what am I saying?? We are all fucked…
I know it’s probably difficult, given that he’s the President at the moment, but I was hoping this wouldn’t devolve into just one more thread where the SDMB makes their hatred of DJT known. Could we focus more on North Korea, and what we ought to do about them? Perhaps if it helps you can imagine that HRC won the election and is the hypothetical new president. What would you like her to do, if anything?
I think Tillerson has the right idea in that a diplomatic solution is the only real and rational option. I think the US must try to establish direct talks with the NK regime. It maybe sounds like capitulation to the demands of a child having a tantrum, but sometimes attention is what’s required in order to keep the child from hurting himself and others. Especially when the child is in possession of nuclear weapons.
if NoKo’s true motivation is to stop America from attacking it, the easiest thing to do would be to sign a mutual defense pact with China, in exchange for dropping its non-conventional military efforts, nuclear and chemical. Then we can deal with a sane nation with sane leaders with our goal being mutually beneficial economic activity. NOKO has nothing we want, but China does.
Yes, this plan depends on some degree of sanity in the NOKO leadership minds. Maybe I’m asking for too much.
so, if we can’t defuse by getting China and NK to defend one another, we need to eliminate the threat before it gets any bigger, with the casualty count in South Korea and among American troops being a necessary loss in order to prevent a worse outcome later.
[QUOTE=crucible]
if NoKo’s true motivation is to stop America from attacking it, the easiest thing to do would be to sign a mutual defense pact with China, in exchange for dropping its non-conventional military efforts, nuclear and chemical. Then we can deal with a sane nation with sane leaders with our goal being mutually beneficial economic activity. NOKO has nothing we want, but China does.
[/QUOTE]
It’s a good thought but it’s not going to happen for a variety of reasons, the biggest being it cuts to the heart of Juche. To do what you are saying would be to pretty much put North Korea OFFICIALLY into an inferior and dependent role with China, and that is just not going to happen. I’d say a good percentage of what we are seeing right now is because China (well…Xi’s faction anyway) HAS been trying to exert influence to get NK to back off and calm things down, and the NKs want to show their own people AND the Chinese that they do what they like when they like.
What “North Korea” wants is the survival of its regime. There are already a number of ways in which they do that - mainly through sheer brutality. It also continues to evade sanctions with the assistance of smuggling and some varying degrees of tacit support of China and Russia, both of whom value NK for its ability to complicate American designs on influencing the region. I’m not a NK expert but it probably wants more economic support from the outside world, including the US. Nukes are its way of blackmailing the rest of the world to ensure the survival of its regime, which puts the US in a difficult dilemma. It can give in and get peace for a few years, or it can stand its ground and make the situation more volatile in the short term.
The danger has always been an accident or a misunderstanding. Obviously NK understands that launching a preemptive strike against the US or any of its allies would elicit a response that would pretty much ensure the near annihilation of its regime and many innocent people along with them, and obviously any preemptive strike by the United States has always brought with it the threat of major destruction to cities in South Korea and Japan, along with US military facilities in these areas. It’s unlikely that either country would seek a war but one or both countries could set off a chain of events that would nevertheless result in one. A bomber gets shot down in a military exercise, the lack of diplomatic channels, an overreaction by an emotional president, and next thing you know we could awaken to a hot war.
I really don’t think the danger is a misunderstanding or open war with North Korea. The danger is North Korea becoming a global proliferator of wmd and missile technology, which those third countries then use, or those countries become unstable and the weapons fall into the hands of private actors.
Assume it is the year 2030 and nk has had another thirteen years to work on this. By then North Korea can probably produce enough fissile material to make several bombs a year. They probably have thermonuclear weapons as well as effective icbms. They now offer to sell fissile material to anyone willing to buy it. Maybe they charge several hundred million dollars per bomb, and use the money to keep the regime afloat.
What happens then? The nations that want wmd tend to be unstable regimes that do not respect human rights. What do we do then? We can’t invade North Korea because of their nuclear deterrent just like we can’t invade North Korea now because they sold chemical weapons to Syria that Syria used against civilians.