I think the risk of a massive confrontation with North Korea is much higher than people realize. Even as recently as Bush era, we could probably have confidence that there’s not going to be a war. Bush and Cheney might have foolishly believed they could remake the Middle East and the oil and the opportunity to remake the region - however delusional there thinking might have been - was a big prize if they were successful. But presidents until now understood that there’s nothing to be gained with conflict from North Korea and a lot to be lost.
It’s a completely different dynamic with Trump because there are many in his administration who are devout nationalists - Trump himself being one. A nationalist president, who seems to be intent on breaking down the existing geopolitical order and tearing up the established norms, is an extremely dangerous wildcard to throw into the mix in the case of North Korea. Trump may well be thinking that it doesn’t matter what happens to our Asian allies, that the only country to be concerned about is us. A globalist president looks at North Korea and says, it would destroy everything that’s important to us; a nationalist president would look at North Korea and say, we can’t let them gain leverage and if we have to bomb them first so be it - and whatever else happens over there is their (South Korea’s, Japan’s, China’s) problem.
North Korea is also the sort of situation that can be exploited as a national emergency back home, and nationalists are almost always authoritarians looking for a crisis to respond to. People who say “North Korea’s been doing this for 60 years” are seeing this from the perspective of a globalist perspective; it’s a nationalist’s country now. There’s a very real chance of war with North Korea.
I wonder how much of US politics North Korea understands. Do they realize how badly the tail wants to wag the dog ? And how much Trump wants a popularity enhancing distraction from the Mueller inquiry, or do they just see a weakened leader and an opportunity to push the envelope?
I’m on YouTube watching excerpts from Haim Saban’s recent interview of Jared Kushner. Jared and his father-in-law are the key idea men for the Trump’s campaign for Middle East peace. They’ve already identified the Israel-Palestine conflict as the key problem that needs to be resolved. Jared brags about the team he’s assembled; Haim asks how the team can function without a single Middle-East expert:
I do think Pence is awful, don’t get me wrong. But I do want to point out that one of the recommended ways to deal with a Narcissist boss is to make entirely useless platitudes to their ego. It involves making all your ideas sound like their ideas.
Of course, you are told to do this while also either going behind their back secretly, or, if that’s no possible, preparing to leave the job at the first opportunity. It’s just to placate them long enough to get away.
I’ll note my sister beat a narcissistic boss this way. getting them fired. She did this until the boss tripped up and did something that couldn’t be ignored. Of course, this was because the people in charge of hiring and firing actually cared, which doesn’t seem to be the case with Trump.
For fuck’s sake Pete, this was supposed to be a gig you couldn’t fuck up. A “gimme.” Just collect your fucking paycheck and go home. A nice little way to visit the motherland in your retirement on the government’s dime. You stupid git.
Just because your boss calls “fake news” every time he’s confronted with something he said or did in the past doesn’t mean you should follow his example. Cameras are everywhere. Archived footage can be accessed in seconds.
“I didn’t say that. That’s fake news.”
“Here’s footage of you saying it.”
“I didn’t call that fake news.”
So you actually said it, but the news of you saying it is false? Plausible deniability has to be plausible.
Nothing to be gained by war with North Korea? I’m not so sure, although I would prefer a more competent president prosecute it. To me, it’s like knowing a crazy cult is openly building bombs in the middle of a residential neighborhood. If you do nothing, today and tomorrow and probably next week and next month will be far more pleasant. But what about next year? And if everyone in the neighborhood knows about the cult, why haven’t they moved away?
IOW at a certain point it’s not our fault if people disregard their own safety so blindly as to live in Seoul. Were I South Korean, I would get my family far away. Maybe to the U.S., like my older kids’ aunt (my ex-wife brother married a South Korean expat), or at least to the southern end of the peninsula. Frankly, it’s irresponsible of South Korea not to have relocated the population center long ago. Nukes aside, there are an absurd number of artillery guns trained on that city. Talk about Damocles’s sword!
I guess we are fortunate that there are no other countries in the world as batshit crazy as North Korea. But what precedent are we setting in treating them so gingerly? The path all the foreign-policy “realists” seem to want to choose strikes me as providing an incentive for future such regimes, instead of making an example of them for no one else to have any interest in following.
Or you could just not give a fuck about truth and gaslight people, which seems to be what everyone in the Trump administration is doing. It’s very Hitleresque, Putinesque. They’re not shying away from the truth; they’re just saying that the truth doesn’t apply to them, that there are new rules that everyone else are going to have to play by, and the rule is, ‘the truth is whatever the fuck we say it is.’ What people watching need to understand is that this isn’t a joke; it’s a deadly serious assault on democratic political norms, and it’s completely incompatible with democratic outcomes.
So you’re suggesting that anytime a neighbor behaves like a Kim or a Hitler or a Stalin, the solution is for neighbors to basically acquiesce and gave up their sovereignty in a mass exodus. One of the most ridiculous things I’ve seen posted in a while. Maybe South Koreans are hopeful that a diplomatic solution can be found, and it probably could be if the United States would stop seeing everything through the prism of the American schoolyard or theological experiences. “Putin’s a schoolyard bully” “Saddam’s a bully”, or “Kim’s a bully, or a cult leader.” Our default solution is to label a regimes bullies or lunatics and then threaten them with overthrow…which usually ends up making our problems 10X worse then before.
“Like a Kim or a Hitler or a Stalin”. Kim is the only one of those three who has been in power in the living memory of anyone but the elderly. And Stalin was rational and deterrable. That leaves Hitler, who required utter defeat in a massive, all out world war. What was your point again?
BTW, the smart thing to do, which definitely rules out Trump doing it, would be to offer China annexation of North Korea in the aftermath of war. That would clear up any notion on their part that we were going for a land grab. It might even keep us from having to put any “boots on the ground”.