Let’s change the stakes a little. What if North Korea threatened us with nukes, unless we did a good thing? Like, "If you Americans don’t institute a European-style health care program – " Ok, that’s a terrible example. The button would probably be pushed before the sentence was completed.
Let’s try again: “You capitalist running dogs will feel our wrath unless you provide $30 million in food aid to address the ongoing famine in Mali and Niger!” Or, “The Juche collective will stick one up your hiney unless the President’s commitment is fulfilled to provide $4 billion over the next three years to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria!” Or, “If you don’t provide a dollar-for-dollar match for Kim Jong-un’s charity drive to benefit National Public Radio stations all across the United States, you better be looking for your iodine pills, you capitalist running dogs! Comrade Kim loves him some Prairie Home Companion!”
Those ultimatums seem a little more difficult for me to come to a conclusion on.
If you give in to Blackmailers then they repeat, and up their demands.
The major problem would be if China and Russia WEREN’T threatened themselves.
They would no doubt by force of habit oppose any miltary, let alone nuclear activity by the West, and subtly add their threats of retaliation if “poor little N.Korea”, were attacked.
China considers N.K. to be its backyard, and Russia holds a lot of hatred against the West, even though ironically it could be regarded as being a nation approaching fascism now rather then its old Cold War Communist self.
I think your analogy may be leaving out the threat of nuclear destruction.
Rarely, if ever, have I witnessed a child ask for a juice box with the accompanying threat of, “or otherwise I will nuke San Francisco”. Well, thinking back, one of the offspring may have said something like that when she was 5 and read a lot of SF.
Lots of people have said they oppose meeting NK’s demands, but no one has explained why they would oppose meeting the demands as a delaying tactic or pretext for launching an attack. I assume no one would actually oppose such, if it offered the best chance at a successful attack. I’ll go further, though, and say that if in exchange for meeting their demands NK agrees to whatever conditions we deem sufficient to guarantee that they will be incapable of posing a further threat to us, then I would think meeting their demands would be the correct course of action. Note that I leave open what sort of conditions we might be sufficient, but I assume there exists some set of conditions short of “let us nuke your entire country to glass” that would do.
I’d be willing to accept the heads of everyone in their government that approved the blackmail plan, as determined by us, delivered to our commander at the Demilitarized Zone, within 24 hours of the threat being made.
Please explain further why the nuclear threat makes a certain type of miniscule demand so unacceptable.
In my view, the argument that if you give in one millimeter, you are perpetually at the mercy of escalating demands a country like North Korea, is just chest-thumping prideful nonsense. The slippery slope is called a fallacy for a reason: one is perfectly capable of saying, “THAT is all that is required to successfully negotiate a peaceful end to this crisis? Pfft, that’s nothing!” and then later saying, “Your demands are insane, and THIS MEANS WAR.”
Let’s frame this a different way. Let’s say Kim Jong-un asks for one penny under threat of war. It seems like many people here would think that any price demanded under a threat is reason enough for the US to launch a nuclear first strike.
I think valuing one penny over the lives of millions of North Koreans is a genocidal and totally immoral position. There is no possible justification for this policy.
If North Korea were to demand something huge, of course war might be a valid option. But to say that we are unable to distinguish between one penny and something big when millions of lives are at stake is a reckless, inhuman, and disturbing ethical position.
You’re blaming the victim. If Kim Jong-un is the sort of psychopath who would start a war and kill millions to steal a penny, he needs to be put down like a rabid dog.
Earlier, Skald the Rhymer quoted Kipling thus: “Once you have paid him the Dane geld, you never get rid of the Dane.”
To answer this question, I would quote more of the poem: “We never pay anyone Dane-geld/No matter how trifling the cost;/For the end of that game is oppression and shame/And the nation that plays it is lost!”
Ooh, there’s the Rudyard Kipling poem about the Dane geld. Well, Kipling’s views on international relations aren’t the type that I place much credence in: if we held Kipling’s poems to be literal and unerring maxims for diplomacy, we might actually believe that the White man’s burden is a good thing.
I question the reasoning of anyone who would seriously propose that North Korea is capable of subverting the United States to its will in the same ways that the Vikings terrorized disorganized villages. I mean seriously, get a grip.
This reminds me of the same kind of concrete thinking which holds that the United States was obligated to attack Iran in 1979 because the invasion of the US Embassy was an act of war, and if there is and act of war, then the only proper response is to declare war, no matter what the actual situation is. This zero-tolerance policy removes human judgment and ethics and renders matters of life and death to being no more than a two line computer code that could be run on a Commodore 64:
No thank you. There is no excuse under any moral code to kill millions of people over a penny, even if you blame the whole thing on a spoiled brat of a dictator, not even if you can find some even better colonialistic poetry to back up your view.
The person who would actually order the launch a nuclear war over a penny is a psychopath who deserves to rot in hell for all eternity.
As has been pointed out, we already negotiate with North Korea and give them significant amounts of aid due entirely to the implicit threat of their nuclear capabilities. Do people really think we should be starting a nuclear war with them? Or is it only explicit threats that require that we kill millions of innocent civilians, including those our allies in South Korea, and risk global conflict with China and Russia? How explicit does it have to be? “Boy, New York sure is a nice city. Hope nothing happens to it.”
China itself has explicitly threatened repercussions if we acknowledge Taiwan as an independent nation. We don’t, even though it’s clearly a fiction. Should we be massacring Chinese civilians rather than giving in?
Seriously, some of the responses here are just laughable. You don’t launch nuclear weapons to back up some idiotic principle. Nuclear weapons are and should be an absolute last resort. Attacking North Korea over a penny, when we already give them millions, WOULD start a war with both China and Russia. Launching nuclear weapons at North Korea would mean the end of humanity. But I guess when Kruschev threatened to bury us, that should have been that. Can’t allow some madman to say things like that!
I should have stated in my last post that any* president* who launches a nuclear war over a penny should burn in hell. I did not mean to imply ill wishes on anyone debating this subject, but I only noticed my poor phrasing just now. I apologize for the error.
We should not be giving the North Korean necrocracy aid. Giving them aid only ensures that they will survive to continue persecuting the North Korean people and threatening and murdering their neighbours.
“Don’t reward people for committing armed robbery” is not an idiotic principle. North Korea has a moral obligation to not try to rob the rest of the world at nukepoint. If they refuse to fulfil that obligation, they need to be dealt with.
He wasn’t threatening people. The meaning was more along the lines of “We will outlast capitalism.”
Well, that sounds like a good idea. But the inevitable shitstorm that would follow against whoever turned the country into glass would not be fun.
Tell an assassin to put some bullets in Un and the chief of military’s head, sure. Bomb the missile facilities even, but there is simply no morality, not to mention any possible good political outcome of nuking the whole country once the South Koreans start getting on news programs talking about how they’ll never again see the family they had trapped over the border. Not to mention all the talking heads lamenting all the innocent victims of the Kim regimes that had to die even though they did nothing worse than be in the wrong part of Korea during the war.
As I asked above, would you accept to be vaporized, along with your family and a couple millions of your neighbours in order to avoid this “life of slavery”? You really think your stance would be worth, say, 100 millions lives?