News this week below make me wonder, especially after “only one thing will work,” “have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea” and “fire and fury such as the world has never seen” statements from Trump, and the “war is inevitable” statement from the North Korean foreign minister this month.
“Trump Admin Secretly Warns People to Remove Assets From South Korea”
"Trump executive order lets Air Force recall up to 1,000 retired pilots for active duty"[quote=“AI_Proofreader, post:1, topic:799782”]
“Trump Admin Secretly Warns People to Remove Assets From South Korea”
[/quote]That guy seems like a conspiracy theorist, to me. YMMV.
Um, that article talks about using the pilots for the war in Afghanistan, not North Korea.
Sometimes you can overreach with an OP.
North Korea’s saber-rattling has always been intended strictly for internal consumption, and Trump doesn’t have anything in his arsenal other than “bluster and threaten until the other guy backs down”.
I don’t think war is any more imminent than it was a year ago.
Uhmm…Nobody thinks that it is Korea that is the agressor. We are worried about the US and it isn’t Trump who decides on such matters.
Nah. So far left he makes Noam Chomsky almost look like Karl Rove by comparison, but in the years I’ve watched him I’ve never caught any major gaffes or factual distortions, and the bulk of what he reports on he backs up heavily with sources, polls, and referenced studies.
Haven’t seen this story circulating very widely yet though, always possible it’s not 100%.
This seems to come up every two weeks.
No, there will not be a war. There’s no profit for America to destroy North Korea, and less profit for North Korea. Mr. Trump is a cheap blowhard, not a warmonger.
Agreed. All signs point to Kim Jung-un not being suicidal; they’re well aware if they strike us they get wiped off the map. Kim could lose his mind or a rogue general could launch, but that’s the kind of existential threat that’s always present.
Trump is the X factor here. Will he overcome his general tendency to simply bully, intimidate, and insult from afar, and take direct action by attacking North Korea? Up until now I would have said no. Now I’m not so sure.
Who do you suppose is the decider, then?
I don’t know. Military industrial complex? The Project for the New American century still in progress?
But both Obama and Trump took war decisions, totally contrary to their prior political views and personalities, after they got the office of president.
Agreed…campaign-Trump railed against the War in Afghanistan, said it was a disaster and wanted to bring the troops home.
President Trump, on the other hand, expanded drone strikes 440%, constantly talks about giving the military free reign, bombed the Syrian government (as if arming opposing rebels and carpet-bombing them wasn’t enough, now we’re going to hit their government too?), and now he’s prodding Iran and North Korea.
The hardliners have always had a special place in their heart for North Korea. It’s why North Korea randomly showed up in George W Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech, apropos of nothing, since it was a speech trying to justify war against Islamic Jihadists “and the nations that harbor them.”
Not agreed here.
While Kim may not be suicidal, his effort to develop nuclear weapons has arguably put his nation in a worse position than it was before it had them.
This talk about the United States (and to a lesser extent SK) wanting to invade and remove Kim is nonsense. The hot war with NK ended over 64 years ago. Neither the US not SK has made any attempt at all to topple the NK regime in all that time. In no way in a military sense. But by making NK a nuclear power, capable of targeting the US, they have made put the destruction of his regime on the table to some who previously would have thought that action folly - including perhaps China.
Trump just can’t snap his finger and start a war with NK. But Kim is making it easier to make a case to do just that. Perhaps not a great case, or a good one, but one could start the argument where one certainly didn’t exist a couple of years ago before he was a nuclear power with an ICBM in development.
Who is nobody? Sorry, but a lot of people realize that North Korea is and has been the aggressor in all of this. What do you think is the root cause of all of the current tension? Trump’s war of words or the fact that North Korea continues to test nuclear weapons and do ballistic missile tests over countries like Japan?
Unless and until the US actually does something along the lines of a first strike, something that seems pretty unlikely, the US isn’t the aggressor except in the minds of those who are willing to handwave North Korean actions and also who haven’t been following along very well. I mean, if the US aggression is in the form of threats and words, well, the NK’s have us beat there by decades. Hell, they were threatening nuclear fire and destruction in Clinton’s day, maybe even in Bush II’s daddies day, and have been threatening war long before even that. And they have been doing real things in the real world that aren’t just wind for longer than that…sinking South Korean warships, shelling South Korean villages, kidnapping and assassinating South Korean and Japanese (and US and European) civilians, digging tunnels into South Korea, and of course doing nuclear weapons tests and missile tests to provoke their neighbors. So, by any reasonable definition, North Korea is pretty clearly been the aggressor in all of this, and the one driving the evolving situation.
As to the OP, no, I don’t think war with North Korea is imminent. Basically, this is just the same old same old. North Korea wants concessions from the West and so has staged the latest iteration of crisis to get it. Eventually, they are going to want food or the sanctions lowered and they will push the situation to the brink to get those things as concessions. They aren’t going to launch a nuclear attack on anyone because they know that would be the end of them. The US isn’t going to attack North Korea because the cost on South Korea and possibly Japan is too steep for the return and because we really have no idea what China will do. China isn’t going to do more than they have already done because they have found out the limits of the power they have over North Korea, and also because it’s in their interest to have the status quo maintained. The key aspect, however, is that the regime doesn’t seem to be ready to collapse at this point. Eventually, it almost has to, and inevitably it will, but not yet. So, it will be much of the same things this winter, and we shall see what happens next year.
North Korea is afraid of a US invasion. With good reason. So it growls a lot and wants a sufficient deterrent.
So if the US has been such a significant threat to invade NK that they need nuclear weapons as a deterrent, why hasn’t the US invaded over the last 65 years? Just what is taking the US so long? "Where / what is the “good reason?'”
Perhaps because a US attack would have entailed the destruction of our good friends the South Koreans, making both look bad ?
Eventually a world power that brooks no dissent will attack you. What was the rationale for Hillary’s destruction of Libya again ?
Perhaps. The United States is more certainly taking the ramifications that any attack would have on NK would have on SK. And the ramifications on Japan, who is none too happy with Kim either. Or with some of our other allies in the Pacific. Yes, I’d agree that the US is considering the needs and requests of all of her allies. Is that a bad thing?
Now I’m confused. Is the US considering what SK wants, or does is “book no dissent?” Seems like you should argue one side or the other and not both. Could you pick one?
I’ll ask for the third time. If the US is so amazing blood thirsty via-a-vis NK, what the hell is taking it so long? It’s been 64 years for God’s sake.
NK just had to take a backseat to Iraq, Lybia, Syria, Ukraine and probably even Iran. It’s still on the list though. Maybe we’ll do NK before Iran.
Yeah, the US had it’s hand full with the long standing US - Ukrainian conflict in the 1950s, 60s and 70s and didn’t have the time to break away from that to go to Korea. :dubious:
Yeah, sure they are. 
Because we’ve invaded them so many times in the last 50 years, they definitely need a nuclear deterrent now, at this stage, to ensure we don’t do it again.
I really need my tiger deterrent this week because the tigers could attack any time. Doesn’t matter that they didn’t attack before I had it, I NEEDS it, now, precious…