In the escalating war of words between Trump and North Korea, I predict that North Korea will declare ‘war’ on Trump as an individual rather than do anything militarily to the US, South Korea or Japan.
There is a line that North Korea knows it can’t pass, and I would assume harassing Trump personally isn’t beyond this line.
So I assume North Korea is going to respond to Trump by engaging in cyberwarfare to hack into Trump’s email accounts, legal papers, financial accounts, his companies, etc to either screw with them, take their money or release private or embarrassing info. They may fund terror attacks on Trump properties overseas, they may even commit crimes against his family or extended family. It’ll be like their hack of Sony to get revenge about the movie the Interview, but much worse.
I don’t support this stuff (in case the FBI is reading), but I predict that is how the North Koreans will respond to Trump’s war of words. They will attack him personally, not the US. They’ll do everything they can to bankrupt and embarrass him as an individual.
I think you may be on to something. I don’t do predictions anymore (since we’re now clearly in Bizarro World), but I could definitely see this happening. I think funding kinetic terror attacks is probably a quick way to earn themselves a carpet bombing, but they could probably get away with some hacking attacks. Since it’s difficult to definitively attribute the source of a hack, the DPRK could do all kinds of mischief and retain enough deniability to escape major retaliation. I think there’s a good chance you’re right.
On the other hand, who the hell knows what Trump would regard as sufficient provocation to retaliate? In response to a hack, he might poke his stubby little forefinger on The Button, or he might just claim an armada was heading to the DPRK when it is really going the other way. Depends on the day you catch him, I guess.
I can see them sending an assassination team over. They had no qualms about murdering a guy in an airport, I’m sure they could pull it off but of course the hit men would be killed or arrested.
That would be an act of war, so I seriously doubt it.
As to the OP:
Well, depends on what they do, but they COULD basically reciprocate US policy, since there is a precedent there, and put Trump and his businesses on a list to an embargo. Not sure it would have the same effect as when the US does that, but if they could get China on board (:dubious:) it might do something.
I’m sure they are already doing all of this (except the terror attacks, which, as noted with Bob’s answer, would be considered an act of war and sort of invalidate the part where they do stuff safely from the shadows) and have been for a while now. While North Korea’s cybersecurity division isn’t as sophisticated as, say, Russia’s (or the US’s), it’s got a lot of brute force and mass, sort of like China’s.
Cyber attacks are still a grey area, so they probably could do this and get away with it, though it would increase the tensions. I think that even hacking Trumps personal or business info wouldn’t be enough to justify war, though. Hell, China hacks us all the time and they are our buddies, and Russia hacked the last election and while we aren’t fast friends no one is talking about trading nukes at this point.
I predict they will respond to his war of words with more words of their own and more tests of both their missile and bomb technology…assuming they can continue down this path since their funding is drying up. They probably have enough stockpiled though to test for a while yet, and I figure that’s what they will do. Personally, I don’t think that they can simply hack either Trumps personal info or his business info at will, so it’s not like they can just smack their foreheads like it’s a V8 commercial and say ‘damn, we should just hack Trump!’. They almost certainly have been trying to do this for a while now (as I’m sure has China, Russia and myriad others, including various non-governmental blackhat groups). Trump might be an idiot when it comes to being president, and probably is pretty clueless about cybersecurity as well…but he has a lot of money and his businesses are almost certainly protected by a competent IT staff at the minimum. It won’t be as easy as it looks like on TV, unless someone on the inside does something stupid (or is bribed to give up the keys to the kingdom)…that is, after all, how Sony got hacked and how most of these hacks you read about happen. It’s not as exciting as the movies, sadly.
Firing a missile over Japan is not an act of war. (Any more than the U.S. Mercury launches were territorial incursions for flying over various African and Asian nations.) Above a certain altitude, “airspace” ceases to be national.
But, yeah, firing on a nation’s territory is an act of war. Nobody’s going to do anything about it – what can be done? – but it is war-like.
While I agree it wasn’t an overt act of war I think there is a bit of a difference between flying a spy plane or a manned mercury mission over someone’s territory is different than firing an ICBM of unknown payload over a country you are hostile too. If the US fired, say, a Minuteman over Russia (or Cuba), that would be the equivalent. Perhaps we have done so and if so, that would be a better example.
That reasoning seems to suggest that such a missile might be seen, before it’s flight is completed, as a potential threat because of it’s unknown payload.
But don’t we basically know the trajectory of the missile almost immediately after it is launched?
What difference? In either case the country whose airspace is violated isn’t going to know what the aircraft or missile’s payload is. There was nothing stopping the USAF from launching nuclear missiles from SR-71s, was there?
I’d predict you’re wrong. Kim doesn’t want war, but thanks to Trump’s bullshit, he now has to push things to the most extreme action short of an actual military assault. That action would be an atmospheric nuclear test, probably delivered by another missile flight over Japan.
It doesn’t have hardpoints or the capability for a nuclear missile, so I’d say that would be stopping them. I seriously doubt that anyone thought the U-2 or Blackbirds were armed (except with cameras) or that the Mercury program had a nuke along with the astronaut either.
Like I said, I don’t think that the launch of the NK bird over Japan was an overt act of war, but it’s not the same as the examples you or Trinopus gave. The fact that the Japanese really didn’t know what the payload was brought this right to the brink but didn’t, quite, go across. If it had, well, things would be a whole lot worse right now, especially in Korea but probably much broader than that.
Trump is an asshole, but this narrative is too much like ‘she deserved to be raped because she was dressed for it’ for my taste. This lashup isn’t Trump’s fault, it goes back way before him, and the fact that he’s pushing back at Kim really means that someone is pushing back at Kim for pushing things. It’s been the latest iteration of Kimmy, v3.0 who has escalated this situation since his daddy died, by launching ballistic missiles and doing more and more frequent bomb testing and cranking up the rhetoric. The fact that our idiot president is playing along just shows how much of an idiot he is, but that doesn’t mean it’s not ultimately Kim et al who are responsible for the current mess.
You explained the difference much better than I. There are also historical reasons between Japan and the Koreans that make this incident more inflamitory.
I argue again that one result of N Korean bluster will be a return to a militarized and likely nuclear Japan.
You miss the point. There was recently a thread thanking a Soviet radar watcher for not overreacting to a blip that could have been an American ICBM. Firing missles into any other nations airspace is provacitive. N Korea is still technically at war with UN forces which I imaginecalso includes Japan.
They might ramp up their defense forces, and they might even legalize overseas deployments, but I really doubt they’re interested in nuclear weapons. There is no Japanese public support for them (especially after the recent reactor melt-down: anything nuclear is pretty awfully taboo right now.)
I seriously doubt that anyone thought the U-2 or Blackbirds were armed (except with cameras) or that the Mercury program had a nuke along with the astronaut either.