Ah yes, how dare the US criticize sane and democratic countries like Iran, who so desperately want a nuke they can launch at Israel whenever they feel like it. Fortunately, Isreal is well prepared for that eventuality.
Regarding WWII, the decision to drop atomic bombs was not taken lightly by Truman. It was a trade-off between saving thousands of US soldiers’ lives versus the 200,000 Japanese civilians’ lives lost in hopes of shortening the war… which it did. At the time, there was no sign that Japan would give up, which meant heavy Allied casualties if there was a land invasion. The US could have carpet-bombed Japan for months as it had Germany, but ending the war quickly was a priority.
When the first bomb dropped, my father’s Army unit was preparing to go from Germany to a staging area outside Japan. If you had asked him, he would have said Truman made a damn good decision, and I agree.
Heck, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs saved millions of Japanese civilians, reservists, and soldiers from being killed in the invasion that never happened.
And arguably has prevented a 1950s/1960s nuclear war fought over/in western Europe.
But the inoculating effect of those two cities’ great sacrifice may finally be wearing off as humanity in general, and megalomaniacal tyrants in particular, have notoriously short memories and large ambitions.
I’m aware of all that stuff. I find the moral reasoning questionable at best, but obviously that’s part of a big and likely very different thread.
But, like, the reality of the situation is that there’s no amount of nuclear devastation that would result in the US getting kicked out of the UN, because as hard as it might be to kick someone out of the UN, it’s impossible to kick a nuclear power out of the UN, and the various aspirational nuclear powers are well aware of this.
Imagine your last name is Kim and you run a small country on an asian peninsula that’s perpetually poor and mostly starving because the rest of the countries in the world think you’re evil and refuse to trade with you. How many of your countrymen would be saved if you just developed a nuclear weapon to make those countries and the UN stop feeling like they could easily push you around? And that doesn’t even require dropping it on someone. Is that moral calculus so different than what Truman decided?
That’s a good question. Could the US, a permanent member of the Security Council, be expelled by the other four permanent members if it nuked Mexico to force it to slow down illegal immigration?
If South Korea posed a real threat to Kim, he could certainly justify beefing up his military, but by building nukes and the missiles to deliver them anywhere in South Korea (and Japan), that’s a level of paranoia he can’t justify, especially considering he is backed by the country with the 3rd largest stockpile of nukes (China). The chances of South Korea invading North Korea are nil, and Kim knows that. The hermit kingdom has nothing to worry about besides feeding its starving population, which it can barely do while diverting most of its resources to the military—a completely different moral calculus than Truman.
Not really, or at least not really within the four walls of your deliberately artificially circumscribed question. But …
Once we add in the tiny fact that Kim isn’t running a country, he’s running a country-sized prison for his personal self-aggrandizement, all moral questions suddenly gain a ginormous weight on the scale that ensures all hypotheticals about Kim’s actions come down on the side of Kim = Bad, anti-Kim = Good.
Perhaps Kim’s actions are predictable or comprehendable. But that doesn’t make them morally good. Not in any way, shape, or form.
Sure, and to clarify: I’m not arguing that North Korea is a moral regime.
I’m just saying that if your goal is to change North Korea’s behavior away from seeking nuclear weapons, a plan that (1) doesn’t address a plausible actual moral calculus of the person who is actually in charge of North Korea and (2) appears to provide massive benefits to NK if they actually manage to achieve a nuclear weapon is extremely unlikely to result in the change you seek.
The way to dissuade megalomaniacal dictators is to kill them before they gather enough power to be a threat to their own country much less anyone else’s. Waiting until they have nukes is waiting long past the time the horse has bolted from the barn. Now you’re just waiting for the uncontrolled / uncontrollable loose horse to kill something so you can sweep up the mess.
This, in a nutshell, and considering how Kim has treated his own people since day one, the US certainly has moral superiority over North Korea, hands down.
Decades after Taiwan was expelled from the U.N., on October 25, 1971, it switched from dictatorship to democracy.
Of course, no serious historian would list that as one of the causes of Taiwanese democratization.
One cause, not the only one, is that the original dictator’s son, although also a dictator of Taiwan, was a big improvement over his father. And the son effectively willed the country to, at his death, pass to a man, Lee Teng-hui, who was, at the time secretly, a complete and total small d democrat. Whether Chiang Kai-shek‘s son, Chiang Ching-kuo, knew what he was really doing when he designated Lee Teng-hui, as his successor, is a mystery of history.
P.S. I would add to countries, previously listed in the thread as deserving of U.N. membership, the thirty year old nation of Somaliland. It’s not perfect but an absolutely real country.
…the US has no moral superiority over anyone. Especially in regard to how it treats its own people. Atrocity after atrocity. The First Americans. Slavery. The current war on transgender people. As mentioned before: you have more people locked up per capita than anywhere else in the world. How on earth can people in America just stand by and let that happen?
Even though Saddam Hussein was a very bad guy, invading Iraq on false intelligence was a bad idea, but who else was going to liberate Kuwait? Attacking Afghanistan after 9/11 was justified, but they should have done that job and gotten out.
The US is far from perfect, but its treatment of transgender people can’t be compared to Kim intentionally starving his population to build weapons of mass destruction. There was no excuse for how Native Americans were treated in North America, but you’re talking about the 19th century and things were obviously different back then, just as there was no excuse for the Spanish Inquisition or the way that Great Britain treated its colonies. I think it’s fair to say Americans have a few more freedoms than North Koreans do.
Dude, the “residential schools” to detox Native American children were operating until the 1970s. You do know that the 19th century is the 1800s, right?
So the US should just let prisoners out so it can drop down to where Cuba is? If you do the crime you have to do the time. Actually, US prisoners are treated far better than NK prisoners I bet.
Our prison policy is extremely racist, targeting black and Hispanic youth with prison terms for specific crimes that white criminals would get no time served. Your response fails to take into account just how much our system is biased against minorities. Is this more of the Nancy Reagan “Just Say No” approach?
Again, you ignore or downplay the serious problems in the US so you can take the moral high ground against North Korea. To the rest of the world, the US isn’t a bastion of goodness and light. Your argument comes off as self-serving and uninformed.
The discussion pertaining to prisoners has got very far afield from the original topic. Please drop this hijack. You can start a new thread to discuss it. Thanks.