1950, I mean. There was an armistice but no peace treaty.
Trump is an idiot, no doubt about it. And his ridiculous tweets are singularly unhelpful. However, no one takes anything that North Korea says at face value since they basically lie about everything and use such ridiculous over the top rhetoric that it’s laughable. They always had the ‘right’ to defend their airspace, and you can bet that if they REALLY thought they were at war with the US their actions wouldn’t be to make silly statements to the world press, but instead to clear the guns for action and start staging troops to either invade or prepare to get pounded.
This is crazy…yall better be burying your can goods and ammo. My bug out bag is ready!! Seriously folks, Trump is as dumb as LBJ was in the 60s. I have no faith in him. There is no way he is smart enough to shut up his pie hole long enough for feathers to unruffle. He is flat foot gonna put us in a war with Kim. And when China decides to back them up we are all dead in the water.
Basically, what XT said. The Norks actions demonstrate that their rhetoric is insincere. If they really believed we had declared war on them, shit would have already hit the fan. It has not, because they do not. If you are buying into their lies, I have pity for you.
You mean the UN building in NYC?
A prime target for the North Korean’s from what I’ve heard. 
Or, heck, perhaps Trump would bomb it as a first strike at North Korea. Some of his base would love it. Either way, I don’t think the guy making the statement on CNN really thought there was a war on…no do I think the rest of North Korea (at least wrt the political elites) do either. I’m certainly not ready to grab my bug out bag and head for the hills at this point…
Something about losing ten stories comes to mind.
lol, exactly.
While I doubt it as well, it wouldn’t be anything new for North Korea. They sent a 31 man assassination team in a failed attempt to kill the South Korean president in 1968 at the Blue House.
Your casualty estimates are low by a couple orders of magnitude.
SK has to know that 50+ million people in Seoul are well within artillery range, and a war that involves bombs and artillery would not end well for many of those people.
Pissing contest, two boys (one orange) at a lake. Nothing new. KJU is full of it.
I think the Howling Yam was offended because NK got a military parade and he didn’t.
Christ, when are conservatives going to understand the hazards of miscalculation. You mentioned the Taliban – the Taliban are still very much relevant in 2017. You mentioned Saddam Hussein and Iraq, which was a foreign policy disaster that will be felt for decades. One that beget ISIS, no less. One that expanded Iran’s power – I’m sure that was part of Dick Cheney’s plan all along. And that right there ought to be something for you to consider: wars quite frequently don’t turn out the way analysts expect.
Just to be clear: the United States could drop a few nuclear weapons on Pyongyang and kill virtually millions within a matter of days, if not hours, and there’s still no guarantee at all that the regime would be dead. What if it turns out that North Korea’s military can live underground for weeks or even months. What if Russia and China decide they’ve seen enough and take up positions against the United States? After all, the fallout is going to be blowing in their direction. Trump hasn’t thought out any of this; he (just like most keyboard warrior conservatives) just assumes that there’s no problem a Titan missile can’t solve.
Nah, talking shit before a fight you’re probably not prepared for is being the epitome of a loose cannon.
Nobody takes the quotation literally, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be taken seriously. Brinkmanship is dangerous. Nuclear brinkmanship is really dangerous. What’s the next step? How far does it go? What’s the end game here? Has the U.S. thought that far ahead?
There are few, if any, diplomatic channels. The only communication between the regimes is the emotionally-fueled bombast that takes place on twitter and North Korea state television. This is not Kennedy-Kruschev, and even that nearly ended in catastrophe.
Since we’re talking predictions here, let me make one of my own. Americans will wake up and find they have less freedom and fewer civil liberties if a hot war actually does break up between America and anybody. The security state will continue to expand. You don’t think this has entered Trump’s mind, given the legal jeopardy he now finds himself in?
Truth be told, I think Trump’s blustery enough to talk about war, but too lazy to actually start one. At worst (and admittedly, this could get pretty bad), someone will do something forcing Trump to respond, which he’ll do by attacking someone or something else.
Well, I would hope no one took it seriously, though by some of the posts perhaps that’s not the case. As for taking Kim seriously…why should we again? It’s not like we haven’t been here before. I think we shouldn’t take him seriously, nor his ridiculous country. Trump’s big mistake is he is taking Kim seriously enough to get into a war of words with the fat fuck.
Funny, then, how the country that is supposedly trembling in it’s boots of the US and it’s allies, who desperately wants nuclear weapons just so it can protect itself (:dubious:) has been playing the brinksmanship game for literally decades. This is just the latest iteration of the same old game. Really, the only thing different is we have a child for a President now, who feels unconstrained by the gravity of his office from saying whatever ridiculous shit comes into his head. But wrt actual actions, we are exactly in the same place as we were with every other president who administered while North Korea existed.
Yeah, it is. But even that isn’t anything new.
Well, I’m sure you think you know the answer to that, but let me ask you something…what’s Kim’s end game? I mean, once his supposed tiger repellent is in place and he has his magic talisman against the supposed threat of US invasion? I think he and his fellows have an idea of what they THINK is the end game, but what do you think it is? Simply staying in power while their country continues to crumble around them? :dubious:
And? Do you think there were more under Bush II, or Obama? How about Clinton? There are pretty much exactly the same channels available today as there were then. The real issue is, Kim doesn’t want a diplomatic solution to any of this, not on any sort of terms acceptable to the US, South Korea and Japan. So, that leaves us with the same mess we’ve had now since before you were most likely born. Certainly since before I was.
Horseshit. We still have communications with North Korea. Seriously, is this supposed to be for dramatic effect? You freaking read the article by a member of North Korea’s ruling elite talking about how the US had declared war after all. IIRC that dude was speaking from the UN building in New York. The US still has diplomatic relations with North Korea, and so does China who we are still talking to as well. For that matter, afaik South Korea still has channels of communications with Kim et al.
Again, the real issue when we cut through the bullshit and hyperbole is that North Korea doesn’t want to talk, they don’t want to be reasonable. They want nuclear weapons and a demonstrated capability to toss them at the US directly, then they want to use that to extort everything they can from the west and keep on keeping on, extorting and pillaging until the next iteration of Kim, version 4.0 arrives to take up the mantle.
No, it’s not. It’s more like a mafia don verse the FBI but the mafia don has a gun to the heads of his own family and will no shit shoot them if the FBI doesn’t bring the don some swag. And it’s the same thing we’ve had for decades. It’s no different now. The threats the don has and uses are different, but the situation is exactly the same. Doesn’t matter if the head of the FBI is a professional or an idiot, the response isn’t going to change.
I doubt anything substantial has entered what goes for Trump’s mind in decades, and I seriously doubt he’s some sort of chess master, working behind the scenes to some master plan. He’s an idiot who rode a wave of nationalism into power, just like the wave of nationalism that’s swept into power various groups in Europe lately. People got sick of the left wing and the centrists and decided, fuck it, let’s see what the crazy right wings gots. :smack:
What makes you think that I or other conservatives don’t “understand the hazards of miscalculation”?
I don’t have any particular insight into what Trump has thought out (neither do you), but I strongly suspect SecDef Mattis has spent a good bit more time thinking over this issue than you have, and knows a good bit more about it than you do.
You really think the USA is “unprepared” for a fight with North Korea? That’s the word you think best describes this situation?
Of course we have to take Kim seriously. The difference now is that as well as talking about bombing the US they are increasingly demonstrating the ability to actually do it.
Handwaving NK made more sense 10 years ago, when people were still estimating that they were decades away from making a true nuclear weapon that could be mounted on a missile and travel across the pacific.
Taking Kim seriously is of course the opposite of what the clown in chief is doing.
The sanctions, and pressuring China to follow through on them, is about all we can do right now in terms of serious actions.
Militarily, I’d be working on options for shooting down the missiles. I understand that this is technically very difficult, but it’s a small country with a small number of nukes (and they’re decades away from being able to launch from a sub ;)), so if it’s going to be feasible in any situation, it’s this one.
This probably is already happening.
Because pretty recent history suggests that conservatives do not (see Iraq and Afghanistan).
Right, and my guess is that he probably has a pretty good understanding that any war with North Korea wouldn’t go precisely as planned. But he’s not the one who makes the final call on this matter. He would tell the president what his options are. He would tell him what he thinks the consequences might be if he chooses plan A or plan B. The president doesn’t listen to experts. He knows more than the generals, remember? Trump is the smartest guy in the room.
Yes, because most militaries are prepared for the wars that take place on maps and in simulations, not the ones that actually happen. Don’t misunderstand me: the United States would obliterate most of what is on North Korea’s surface, leaving with more craters than people in most areas. At what cost, though? You can’t just think about ‘winning’. Winning will have a price tag.
It’s not Kim that I take seriously; I take the situation in total seriously. Kim is a part of that situation; Trump is another factor. If you don’t take the situation seriously, that’s probably because you don’t understand how wars happen in the first place.
You cannot disassociate Trump from the situation – the Trump factor makes this different, as does the Kim Jung Un factor. It might be the same stage but these are different times, this is a different scene, and these are different actors.
I don’t think any of us are in a position to know for sure precisely what North Korea would accept, but the essence of it is that the regime must survive. For it to survive, there needs to be some reassurance that it won’t end up like Iraq or other countries that have been invaded throughout history in the name of “security” of the aggressor. It will not give up its nuclear program, and it will probably continue to use its weapons program to intimidate and threaten the US alliance until economic sanctions, which have existed in one form or another since the end of the war, come to an end.
You say that Kim doesn’t want a diplomatic resolution. Do you think he wants war?
It’s not freaking out; it’s pointing out that there are virtually no channels of direct diplomatic communications that would resolve any perceived threat in time before it unfolds into a massive all-out war.
Of course they want nuclear capabilities. From our perspective, it’s threatening, scary, and “unreasonable”; from the perspective of a regime that has been thrown into the same category of pariah states that have been invaded, it is perfectly reasonable to take all necessary steps to demonstrate how painful a similar move would be. Shit, there’s nothing reasonable about amassing 10,000 nuclear warheads, and yet both the United States and USSR did it. Why? Were they being “reasonable” in being able to radiate the earth? There’s nothing reasonable about it, unless you acknowledge that the real motive behind it is to make you as unappealing a military target as possible, which is what North Korea is now trying to do, just like China did, just like the Soviets did. Nukes are a country’s way of saying “Don’t fuck with me”
It doesn’t take a mastermind to create an authoritarian state. It simply requires the desire to silence your opponents, and we’ve seen an endless supply of that from Donald Trump and the American right wing. All they need is a national emergency. All it took in Germany was 37% of the electorate and a fire in the Reichstag.
The situation is serious, but it’s really the same situation we’ve been in for a long time. Nothing really has changed except that the North Korean’s have upped their capabilities and continue to push things.
For anyone following along with this through the years though, it’s the same old same old. As for Trump, I’ll address that later on.
Tell me specifically, how has Trump changed the situation? I think you are giving him WAY too much credit for doing anything at all. Basically, the heated and threatening rhetoric coming out of North Korea today isn’t really any different at all than it was in the past. During the Obama administration, they made a video about nuking Washington DC. Really, the only difference now is that the over the top language and silly threats are a two-sided conversation now with our child president, instead of simply having North Korea haranguing us on their own. From the perspective of the US government we aren’t doing anything differently today than we did under Obama…or Bush II…or Clinton…or Bush I. From North Korea’s perspective they aren’t really doing anything different either, though obviously, they have gained access to some resources (probably magic fairies giving them technology and materials) that have allowed them to test at an increased rate. Even that, however, happened during both Bush II and Obama’s administration. Before missile and atomic tests, though, the North Koreans did other things to push the situation, especially when they wanted something.
I agree it won’t give up on nuclear weapons. We simply disagree as to why they want them and what they plan to use them for. I think it’s laughable that people really believe they want them for defense and to ensure they don’t get invaded by the US, especially at this late date…they freaking tested the first one in 2006 and probably have as many as several dozen by now, especially with the help of factions in China…er, I mean the help of magic nuclear fairies giving them tech and resources. North Korea was never Iraq and didn’t need nuclear weapons to ensure that they didn’t go out like either Iraq or Libya or the Taliban in Afghanistan.
No, I said he didn’t want a diplomatic resolution that would be acceptable to the US and its allies. I’m sure he’d LOVE a diplomatic solution that involved the West giving him boatloads of swag (all with the labels removed and North Korean labels added instead), a unified Korea under his banner and maybe a new Ferrari to drive on the empty streets of his capital. Hookers and blow would probably be appreciated as well, and maybe a lifetime supply of pizza.
No, I don’t think he wants war. What I think is that HE thinks war isn’t going to happen, so he can push things as he wants to achieve his goals, ramping up the threats whenever it isn’t going the way he wants. If there is any similarity between Kim and Saddam it’s that…he doesn’t think war will ever happen and keeps pushing because, histocially, Kim’s have always pushed and nothing bad has ever happened.
Ok, this is like your assertion earlier that things have changed under Trump. Do you have a cite showing that there are fewere communications channels available today than under, say, Obama? Same with the Trump thing…show me something other than idiotic twitter posts that has changed under Trump wrt North Korea. Have we moved more troops to Korea? Have we positioned the fleet or even started moving it to the region? Have we moved large pieces of the Air Force to Japan, Guam or Korea? What has Trump done that’s different than what Obama did wrt Korea from a procedural perspective? Sending some tweets doesn’t constitute, well, anything, really wrt the position of the US or it’s stance.
They have had them since 2006…probably even before that since that’s when they first tested them. As for the ‘real’ motivation, I disagree with your assertion as to what their ‘real’ motivation is or has ever been wrt nukes. Perhaps you didn’t notice, but North Korea has been around since the late 40’s, yet, despite not having nukes they are still there. Now, you could say that the Soviets were the reason for that, but you might want to check to see when they folded and do some math as to the difference between when the Soviets were around and when North Korea developed nukes…and the lack of tiger attacks in North Korea. Er, I mean US invasions. IOW, they have always had a ‘DOn’t fuck with me’ card…those 10’s of thousands of artillery pieces aimed at Seoul, as well as all the other nasty stuff they have that could potentially wreck South Korea AND international trade routes transporting trillions a year through the region.
Sure…a Germany who’s republic was weak and who’s economy was reeling from their own great depression. And Trump ain’t no Hitler…mentally he’s more akin to Pinky than the Brain.