You are IMO confusing cause and effect. The US has troops in South Korea because the leaders of NK are paranoid, nutcase aggressors. The leaders of NK are not paranoid, nutcase aggressors because the US has troops on the border.
Like I said, you might want to read up a bit more on the history of the peninsula before you make up your mind. You do realize the current leader is the son of the guy who invaded, do you not? It is sort of a dynasty of dysfunction.
The reason NK has not entered the realm of the civilized world, as East Germany did, is because the actions of the leader(s) have been aimed at preventing this. Kim and his ilk are not paranoid because the US is threatening him - the US is threatening him (to the extent that preventing someone from re-invading is threatening) because he has done all that he reasonably could to make enemies of the whole freaking world, apart from other terrorist states like NK.
He is currently in the process of pissing off the Chinese, for heaven’s sake. Even his sponsors get the treatment.
If you shoot up a bank and take the tellers hostage, it is not the police’s fault if you are surrounded by SWAT teams.
What is the basis of your belief that North Korea alone can survive into the 21st century, but North Korea + South Korea would collapse of its own weight? How would having access to the people and resources of the South make a difference to a regime that doesn’t care if its people starve?
Part of it has to do with how isolated North Koreans are from the rest of the world. Not only are they isolated in terms of where they can go but their access to foreign media is nearly non-existent. The North Korean situation is rather unique.
If they wanted peace I’m sure the South Koreans and Americans would have been happy to sign a peace treaty.
I certainly can’t say what would have happened had North Korea taken the whole of Korea. The United States didn’t push North Korea to throw political dissidents into camps, to isolate itself from the rest of the world, or to enact policies that cripple their economy and starve their people. Based on what we know of North Korea today we have very little evidence that the country as a whole would have been better off under their rule. Would it be as bad or worse? I honestly can’t answer that question and neither can anyone else.
The U.S. military buildup has certainly played a role in the current state of Korea as a whole and I’d have to say that it’s been a positive role.
But how is South Korea not the counter-example to what you’re suggesting? It has had NK’s guns (supported by China) pointed at it for just as long as NK has had SK’s guns (supported by the US) pointed its way, and yet the two nations have taken very different paths over the last 20-30 years. Why did cult-of-personality dictatorship continue to thrive in the North but wither away in the South?
Because of exactly what you just said - the South has had US support for all that time. While it might have to fear artillery, it doesn’t need to fear invasion. The North does.
I remain dubious that the North is fucked up because of the presence of US troops. There always has to be an outlier among the commonwealth of nations.
I’d say that the probability of invasion has always been higher from North to South and vice versa. After all, that’s exactly what happened. Also, the US forces in SK have never been of the type or quantity to make a real invasion possible. It’s also more difficult to invade North Korea from the South without giving away your hand than it is to go from North Korea to the South, due to terrain and concealment…so the NK’s would certainly know if an invasion was coming fairly early in the game.
[QUOTE=Really Not All That Bright]
I remain dubious that the North is fucked up because of the presence of US troops. There always has to be an outlier among the commonwealth of nations.
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Totally agree
ETA:
[QUOTE=even sven]
Could they have signed a peace treaty and maintained their ability to rule as a Communist country?
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Sure, why not? A peace treaty isn’t a surrender document. They certainly could have signed a peace treaty and continued on as masters of their own little prison camp, had they chosen (heh) to do so.
I doubt concealment would have much to do with it. In either case there would be thousands of tanks crossing the border as well as infantry, so it wouldn’t be a secret for more than thirty seconds.
[QUOTE=Really Not All That Bright]
I doubt concealment would have much to do with it. In either case there would be thousands of tanks crossing the border as well as infantry, so it wouldn’t be a secret for more than thirty seconds.
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Well, the point is that you couldn’t really surprise the NK’s with some sooper sekrit invasion. The US would have needed to stage up and build up it’s supplies, logistics and move in all the gun bunnies and tanks and such. It would have been a bit obvious. On the other hand, the NK’s COULD stage up quite a bit without anyone really noticing, since their border areas to the DMZ are heavily fortified and tunneled, with gods know what under there (10’s of thousands of artillery pieces at least, planes, tanks…who knows what else?).
So, paranoia wise, I’d say it would be the South who would be more justifiably paranoid of the North than vice versa…after all, the North had invaded them once as a surprise, and the North also periodically took pot shots at the South.
I guess I don’t believe that the ruling clan was destined to be crazy in exactly the way they are currently crazy (i.e. build the military at the expense of all things.) Without what they see as hostile forces at their doorstep, I think it is more likely that Kim Il Sung would have had his crazy run, but then eventually integrated into the a world Communist system, which was on it’s way to it’s eventual collapse- if our big fear was the Russia or China would have control, I think it’s clear now that Russian or Chinese control would have been waaaaaaay preferable to North Korean control. I don’t see why it couldn’t have been more like Vietnam or Cambodia, which were certainly bad but never got to the point where they were threatening to blow up the world.
I think to some degree (and this is of course not the only factor) that the perpetual ceasefire kind of kept NK in a state of arrested development. It set up a situation where the country became entirely geared towards its own survival, and the craziness of it’s leaders became channeled in that direction. It’s not a direct cause-effect thing…more like a feedback loop that keeps the place perpetually focused on military might and unable to change or mature as a nation.
even sven: are you even aware of the overtures that the United States has made to reduce tensions with North Korea over the last several decades?
In the early 1990s, North Korea (while secretly working on its own nuclear program) hooted and hollered about the threat of US nuclear weapons in South Korea. George HW Bush withdrew them.
In an agreement to end North Korea’s nuclear program once it was uncovered, we agreed to supply them with fuel oil and a light water reactor. They queered the deal in order to keep building nuclear weapons.
The South Koreans adopted the sunshine policy to try to, in essence, bribe North Korea into chilling out a little bit. It doesn’t seem to have worked.
The West has made a number of significant initiatives that could have been confidence building measures to reduce tensions on the peninsula. These were undertaken even as the North was doing things like launching missiles over Japan, sending spies into South Korea, and counterfeiting US currenecy. Every. Single. One. of the confidence building measures has been torpedoed by the North.
How does this square with confidence building measures extended to other countries in US crosshairs? We had significant agricultural cooperation with the Soviet Union. We have limited trade relations with Cuba, entirely within the agricultural sector. We have huge trade relations with China. The threat of these countries, and our threat to them, FAR exceed that posed to/from North Korea. Witness that our entire strategic arsenal of nuclear weapons exists primarily to counter Russia/Soviet Union and China.
If we accept your assertion that North Korea is a totalitarian state to some degree because of this overwhelming threat from the United States, explain to me why every goddamn threat to peace on the peninsula has come from the North for the past six decades. How do you seriously explain that the Norks are so afraid of us, that they undertake these actions:
Blew up a dozen senior ROK government officials in Burma in 1983
Use commandos to try to kill the ROK’s president in 1968
Seize a US ship in international waters in the same year
Shoot down a US Air Force plane in 1969
Kill the ROK’s first lady in 1971
Attack and murder several US servicemen trying to cut down a tree in 1976
Plot to kill ROK officials on a visit to Canada in 1982
Hijack South Korean airliners in 1958 and 1969, and then blew one up in 1987
Send literally thousands of military infiltrators into South Korea over a period of decades
Test fire a missile over Japan in 1998
If North Korea was so threatened by the presence of US troops in South Korea, how do you explain that North Korea has taken extensive actions to provoke hostilities against the US and South Korea? What is the logic here? How are these tensions explained by having US troops in South Korea?
By the 1990s, of course, it was a little too late. North Korea could have changed, perhaps, if they had managed to melt into the Communist bloc. By the 1990s there was no real Communist bloc to become a part of.
It was a pretty ugly authoritarian dictatorship (though of course nowhere near as bad as NK) until 1987.
Perhaps because by 1987 the Soviet Union was fizzling out and China was starting down it’s road towards liberalization. The credible threats towards South Korea (as in, those that could pose threat to the US military) were quickly dissolving, leaving the country to experiment with non-military regimes.
I suppose starting with the preconceived notion U.S. military/foreign policy = BAD, the requisite conclusion in this matter (Resolved: The US Military buildup played a role in the current state of North Korea) is a given. An incorrect conclusion based on some biased anti-U.S. or anti-war sentiment, but obviously drawn, nonetheless.
A fundamentally fallacious cause and effect, methinks.
Again, I think you are confusing cause and effect. The perpetual ceasefire was necessary because of the state of arrested development (an excellent characterization of the NK leadership, by the way).
See Ravenman’s post. NK does not act because it feels threatened; it is threatened because of how it acts.
And your suggestion that things might have been better if we had allowed the North to conquer South Korea is also hard to buy. One of your examples of how this might work is Cambodia. Have you read anything about Pol Pot? Do you seriously think that, overall, things might have been better if Kim and his type had had the opportunity to slaughter South Koreans with the same hideous abandon as they have the Northerners?
I think people need to read the comments made in the thread and particularly the OP more closely. Nobody is blaming America or assuming our policy is crap. There is universal agreement on cause and effect. NK started it. Nobody is trying to take your bugaboos away and say that NK is the victim.
Our and the UN’s involvement in the war has of course shaped its current state. The key point is this:
[QUOTE=even sven]
What do you think would have happened if the US had never been involved? Is the only possible explanation “North Korea would have ran over South Korea and it’d be exactly the same as today, but bigger.” I just don’t buy that is the only possible explanation in the entire world. I think it’s far more likely (or at least possible) that North Korea would take over South Korea, and then the whole thing would have fizzled out along with the rest of Communism in the 1990s. It’d probably be another post-Soviet state, without nuclear ambitions or grinding poverty. This doesn’t mean we didn’t do the right thing by defending South Korea, hindsight is 20/20 after all
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I think it is a clearly made point about the intertia of conflicts and that’s pretty much it. Its a good idea to put the current result into the context of probable outcomes if we had chosen other options such as doing nothing. We have been continuously faced with this question since the Korean War.
I see no reason to believe that the North Koreans would be any less paranoid if they had been allowed to conquer South Korea. The human rights of those under their horrific rule would, of course, have been almost infinitely worse. As mentioned, Kim would be just as willing to starve and slaughter his own people if they included the South.
Further, I see no reason to believe that North Korea would be any less likely to persist into the 21st century if they controlled the whole of the peninsula. As mentioned, their only remaining sponsor to date is Red China, and China’s move towards a modicum of economic freedom has done nothing to get the Norks to lighten up. Just the opposite - Kim is pissing them off too, stealing the aid trains they send him. I suspect the prospect of a few million Chinese streaming over his border was at least at the back of whatever passes for Kim’s mind when he was working to develop The Bomb.
I have seen no evidence at all that the US build up played any significant role at all in the disaster we currently call North Korea. If we had done nothing, everything, including the attitudes of the NK leaders, and their likelihood of continuing to infest the world with their vile and pestiferous actions, would be either the same, or worse. Much worse.