Someone at work just asked that. I’m not sure how to answer them.
On one side, any world leader would have to be Bat Shit Crazy to try to play the Brinkmanship game with a certifiably insane world leader with nuclear weapons and a bad haircut.
But… on the otherhand… empirical evidence seems to point to that happening right now.
I probably should just say “don’t worry about it”… but is that the right answer?
Yes, Kim is crazy to do that.
Regards,
Shodan
And Kim Jong-un is just as bad.
ETA: Punchline ninja’d by Shodan.
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We’re already at war, in several places. What’s one more interminable brush-fire? 
DPRK is VERY good at brinksmanship. While the opportunity for miscalculation is great, I think this is most likely to be more of the same.
Trump: You know what? Let’s fire some missiles over there, OK? That gentleman isn’t… look, he’d be foolish to start a war with us. So we launch some missiles, maybe take out some artillery… I don’t know. But we make it clear to him, that gentleman, that he needs to… He’s a bad hombre, all right? Bad hombre. Very bad. He needs to stop causing trouble. So we’ll just teach him a lesson. Teach him a lesson.
My feeling is that the little fat childish despot will back down from the big fat childish despot.
Crazy as Kim is, he knows that China and/or the US will wipe the floor with him. Killing 10,000 south Koreans will be of little satisfaction to him when he’s sitting in a South Korean jail or worse, strung up by his own generals.
So far, at least, Trump’s military adventurism has been run by the generals - whom appear to know what they’re doing.
Going off on a tangent here: but does anyone think Kim is under threat at home? I know he’s done some executions (though we also got some fake stories on executions), and I’ve heard his rhetoric has been escalating in recent years (not reading/speaking the language, I don’t know it that’s true). And I know there have been more tests and missile launches as they work on that program. But what I was thinking of most recently was his brother’s assassination. Obviously, a lot of people think he was behind that. But was he killed because there was some actual increase in the likelihood of him being set up as a new leader/figurehead for parties overthrowing Kim or for some other reason? Why now (a few months ago)? If the threat of a regime change (from internal forces) is real/increasing, how does that affect Kim’s likely future behavior regarding external forces?
Separately, we can try to figure out how Chinese and US opinions/actions are changing recently. Will see what the media has to say about meeting tomorrow, etc. But I’m kind of interested in internal politics in NK, too. It’s just we know so little about that. “We” being the public; no idea what the governments of the world know/suspect.
I don’t think his position is as secure as he’d like… maybe even significantly weak. I think he’s appeasing the generals for now, increasing their prestige to the cost of other power centers. That’s not the same thing, though, as unstable or failing. What looks like insanity to the outside has to be played through the filters of internal perception and politics. He’s playing to the outside only as a secondary effort.
Saddam Hussein was also very good at brinksmanship, too, until he bluffed one pot too far with people who were just looking for the excuse to initiate regime change. At least Iraq was essentially without allies or a strong patron to provide military support to oppose such an invasion. North Korea has a powerful patron in the Peoples Republic of China, and while China has no desire to go to war its largest trading partner, it only takes a short chain of misunderstandings and ill-considered decisions to enter into a conflict that neither party knows how to walk back from.
Any military commander who is honest with himself, or with those he is speaking to, will admit that he has made mistakes in the application of military power. He’s killed people - unnecessarily. His own troops or other troops. Through mistakes, through errors of judgement. A hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand, maybe even a hundred thousand. But he hasn’t destroyed nations…And the conventional wisdom is: don’t make the same mistake twice. Learn from your mistakes. And we all do. Maybe we make the mistake three times, but hopefully not four or five. They’ll be no learning period with nuclear weapons. Make one mistake and you’re going to destroy nations. [RIGHT]–Former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara in Errol Morris’ The Fog of War[/RIGHT]
McNamara lived the Cold War and our colossal fuckup in Viet Nam under Kennedy and Johnson for almost seven years, including the Cuban Missile Crisis, the ascendency of the Soviet Union as a nuclear superpower, and military and strategic leaders arguing for a disarming first strike against the Soviets even if it would result in the deaths of millions of American civilians. He is basically the authority on what not to do in international conflict, having made most of the mistakes that can be made just short of initiating a nuclear attack. From his experience he criticized the invasion of Iraq, cautioned about the unintended consequences of the War on Terror, and wrote extensively about the need to find ways to deal with conflict and disorder without resorting to warfare or at least finding ways to minimize killing and the potential for minor conflicts to turn into global war with strategic implications. If he were alive today, I think he’d be strongly cautioning against playing a game of brinksmanship with a hermit kingdom run by a dictator with no experience with war or likely good counsel. Of course, I think he’d also be horrified with our election of a volatile reality show star with delusions of significance and an intolerance to even the most farcical criticism. Hell, I think Philip K. Dick would be horrified, as this is basically a plot out of a rejected alt-history story caused by some kind of combination of reality-altering drugs and a cheap potboiler novel.
If we don’t end up in war, or at least with a horrifying exchange between North Korea and South Korea and Japan, it’ll be more luck than good judgment at this point.
Stranger
If he starts something, or refuses to de-escalate and causes a pre-emptive attack, his generals will hand his fat ass over to South Korea on a silver platter. Why? Because someone will have to run the former DPRK and the existing military leaders will be only too happy to step in, pretending like they never supported the crazy fat kid and his father and grandfather.
Well, technically the war in Korea never ended.
Only if you actually push it over the edge to actual war is Bat Shit Crazy. To date, the North Koreans haven’t done that, though they have certainly pushed it to the ragged edge several times. The trouble is in a miscalculation. Ask Saddam about that.
Why? What points to that level of evidence that we are about to go to war?
I think it is, yes. The thing is, none of this stuff is particularly new. It’s been going on for a long, long time. Certainly having The Donald in charge is an added worry, but I seriously doubt he is going to do anything more than bluff and bluster wrt actual military action. What he does seem to have been able to do (jury is still out of course) is to finally get China off the fence or quasi on the NKs side and get them to start applying pressure, which is a positive change in what’s been the status quo…maybe. Possibly.
But yeah, ‘don’t worry about it’ seems to be the attitude of most South Koreans, so I think that’s a safe bet.
Hence, the qualifiers I included. Your’s is a reasonable position - I just don’t think it most likely of the options.
QuickSilver, you can bet anything you care to wager that he’s aware of that, and is taking it into his calculations. The only questions are, just how good are the data he’s using for his calculations, and just how good is he at the socio-political math?
I sure as fuck hope I’m wrong and you’re right. But remember, Trump is the president who has repeatedly dismissed the value of the strategic alliance we’ve depended on to keep Western Europe secure for almost seventy years, who deliberately snubbed the de facto leader of the European Union for no good reason, and who wants to build an unworkable border wall that even the Border Patrol doesn’t want and make Mexico somehow pay for it even though they’ve made it clear that it is offensive even in concept. He is not a good judge of international relations or negotiation tactics as even a cursory perusal of his ironically titled The Art of the Deal will indicate. He’s basically Archie Bunker pontificating world events from his Queens-influence view of relality from a gilded La-Z-Boy. I have zero confidence in his restraint or judgment.
Stranger
What is too much to ignore wrt to North Korea? Does the world wait until he has missiles that can reach the USA? I am not advocating letting South Korea being blown up, but at what point do we say enough. Better yet, the world says enough. Waiting seems to be to North Korea’s advantage. What are possible options that haven’t been explored?
Well, waiting has been the strategy because most people realize that, in the long-term North Korea is simply not sustainable. It WILL fold, sooner or later. Now, that might entail a whole host of bad things (in fact, it almost certainly will), but it’s possible that, no matter how bad they are they won’t be as bad as a shooting war. It seems to me to be a decent bet, certainly it was in the past. The people who are suffering most are the North Koreans, and there is little the world could do about it at this late date that would allow them to be better off (think about how much the US ‘helped’ the Iraqis getting out from under Saddam’s thumb and multiply that several fold to know how much ‘help’ it would be for the North Koreans to be liberated from the Kim family).
Pressuring China economically and diplomatically to reign in North Korea–for which it is a desperately needed patron and interface with the rest of the world–is a far better strategy, and one that was only weakly pursued under Obama in favor of a direct negotiation strategy which was about as effective as calling up Time-Warner for technical assistance. China has the means and wherewithal to influence North Korean leadership and ultimately to restrict the materials and funds they need to develop weapon delivery systems and has not because (IMHO) they want a certain level of strategic destabilization in the region to bolster their own military ambitions as the dominant regional power looking to global superpower status.
Threatening North Korea directly will not achieve the desired result of dismantling their nuclear weaposn and ballistic missile programs, and if taken too far to quickly may push North Korea into a corner where the military feels it must respond even if the result is cataclysmic. “Oh, but nobody would ever commit suicide like that!” And yet, we have the historical precident of Fidel Castro requesting a Soviet nuclear strike on the United States if they were invaded, knowning full well that it would be the end for Cuba and its people. And Castro was a mostly pragmatic leader; who the fuck knows what is going through the mind of a cartoon-figure dictator raised from birth to be the Great Leader without ever having to learn diplomacy or international relations. We’ve managed to avoid a nuclear exchange over the divided peninsula for over sixty years; we should be looking for ways to maintain that record rather than goad the DPRK into ill-considered action.
Stranger
Then why haven’t they done that already? Nothing’s stopping them from doing that now, right? Are they afraid the North Korean populace will revolt if anything happens to Kim?
It seems to me that the generals must have drunk the Juche kool-aid wholesale to even be in the position they’re in. And in that case, I’d imagine we’d see something like we did in Japan, where even a nuclear strike can’t reliably convince them to surrender.
I don’t think they trust one another enough to have a conversation about it. While little Kim remains a figurehead, it’s dangerous to know who to trust if you’re going to suggest a coup. Odds are probably very high that you’ll become cannon fodder. Not because the guy you tell loves fat dear leader but because each general stands to gain by dropping the dime on his fellow general.
But once the shooting war starts and things begin to look like NK won’t survive the next round of bombing, it’ll be a rush to either give Kim up or simply be the guy who puts a bullet in his head first.
Trump is backing China into a corner, North Korea is their problem and its about time they solved it. China’s mercantile trade with the US has put China in a position, where they now have something to lose if they full out back North Korea, and their own reputation in the world for failing to back North Korea.
The American solution to the situation, is to let kim be kim doing it gangnam style, and give China and out for not backing North Korea, to its other clients. This is not without risk, and probably the reason the entire senate was briefed in the whitehouse.