What will be Trump's First Foreign Policy Crisis?

Politics & Elections
81

Seoul, and cities generally, will only fall if there are troops on the ground to take it. Bombardment, even heavy bombardment, cannot militarily take a city - just like London didn’t “fall” during the Blitz and German cities didn’t “fall” during Allied bombing campaigns. The civilian population in Seoul might be evacuated and much of the city seriously damaged in initial NK artillery bombardment, but only NK ground troops can actually seize and occupy it. And the likelihood of them being able to do so is very small at present.

In my hypothetical, I said that there could be undiscovered tunnels. Let’s triple the known ones and say that there are 12 undiscovered tunnels. Once tanks, trucks, and troops start pouring through, how long in terms of hours do you think the SK entrances would be free from air strikes designed to obstruct the southern exits and ultimately block the tunnels? To remain undiscovered so far, the tunnels would likely be fairly narrow and could not likely allow two or more tanks or military trucks to traverse the tunnel side-by-side. Just look at the ones that have been discovered. They don’t even look big enough for any kind of vehicle except maybe a motorcycle or a smart car. That is going to severely limit how many vehicles (if any) and troops can exit the tunnels before their southern exits are destroyed or collapsed. Massive artillery barrages and a few light infantry divisions that might be able to emerge from the tunnels before they are destroyed aren’t going to be enough to take Seoul, let alone South Korea.

Just like the main highway from Kuwait to Iraq was a shooting gallery for U.S. and Coalition air power, I’m sure the USFK/UN Command in charge of the defense of SK would fantasize about NK being so carefree and foolish to use open highways to fully advertise the presence and route of their invasion forces.

Vietnam was very different from the Korean War. And would still be very different from any Korean War II, since the government of South Korea isn’t a changing array of military dictators or strongmen that don’t have much popular support or legitimacy. The U.S. consistently beat the People’s Army of Vietnam’s offensives (greatly aided by its air supremacy over South Vietnam), but withdrew for mostly political reasons.

And MacArthur definitely did not do everything possible to avoid drawing China into the conflict. Even before China intervened, he wanted to take the war into China to overthrow Mao. He, along with President Truman, discounted plenty of warning signs and arrogantly assumed that even if China did intervene, U.S. and U.N. forces could easily handle them.

82

Um, it’s been US foreign policy for a very long time to piss China off. They aren’t exactly nice people running that place.

83

ahhhhh… No.

Not really.

Not at all, actually.

Do you know who ranks #2 behind Canada in terms of total trade with the US?
Do you know who is the largest foreign holder of U.S. debt, and owns more than $1.24 trillion in bills, notes, and bonds?

Do you know who is going to break Trump’s balls?

84

His balls? Not necessarily our balls, just his? OK, give me a minute, think this over…

85

We have long criticized China’s human rights record, it’s trade policies, and have quite recently been involved in shows of force around the Spratleys. In addition, we are committed to defending Taiwan and other nearby nations against China.

Now if you want to predict that China will win any faceoff against Trump, go ahead and place that bet. But I think you fail to understand who actually holds the strong cards.

86

So, if we had a room full of Ph.D.'s in Chinese/US foreign policies, they would all say, in one voice, yep, ol addy’s got it right again?

87

Depends, is the face-off on Twitter or Facebook?

88

Chinese Twitter gives a whole new meaning to “140 characters”.

89

Your post to content ratio has to be absurdly low.

90

Can we at least wait until he takes office to start reflexively attacking the substance of his policies? While his form here was pretty unusual, it reflects no change in actual policy and is no worse than a President seeing the Dalai Lama.

The only thing to really be concerned about is trade policy, which could genuinely provoke China, but most Democrats SAY they support getting tough on China on trade. They wouldn’t just be talking tough to fool their working class constituents, now would they?

91

I don’t entirely disagree with this – China needs to be confronted and the U.S. has some hands to play. If he’s skillful enough, he might be able to use an aggressive style that would enable the US to deal with China diplomatically, but from a position of perceived greater strength. If he’s not so skillful, then he overplays his hands, gets called out on his bluffs, blunders strategically and empowers China even more. It remains to be seen what happens but I don’t disagree with Trump throwing a brush back pitch once in a while.

92

It works both ways – the US needs China and China needs a large market full of consumers, which is us (at least for now). I certainly don’t advocate needlessly provoking China but I tend to agree with Addy on this one that the media are overreacting on this one. For its part China doesn’t seem to be too panicky either. It’s a phone call for cryin aloud.

93

The answer is both. Are you more scared of a mugger with a baseball bat or a toddler with his finger on the trigger of a loaded Uzi? The mugger intends you harm but with some skill and luck you may be able to limit the damage to some nasty bruises. The toddler has no idea how much damage it could do or the consequences thereof, but if not handled carefully could easily end up causing mass death and destruction.

I suspect the Democrats’ strategy will be to try to limit the damage Trump does while leaving him in place and using every opportunity to point out that this is what you get when you vote Republican. There’s no benefit to them to actually remove Trump; they can get more mileage out of forcing the Congressional Republicans to either repudiate Trump (and thus piss off all the people who voted for him) or link themselves to him (which will hurt them at the next election). It’s not the worst plan in the world, although the Democrats have a long history of missing open goals so who knows.

Doesn’t China have a metric shit-ton of missiles able to hit Taiwan? China may have the same challenges in landing on the island as Germany did with Britain, but rockets have come a long way since the Blitz. And I know that Taiwan has missiles too, but they’d still come out far worse in an exchange.

And yes, “it’s just a phone call”. And some tweets, and a few off-the-cuff remarks in public etc etc but international diplomacy is incredibly nuanced and easy to fuck up if attempted by ham-handed amateurs. If we assume that China will see Trump’s actions and statements as the clueless bungling they are, they may be less likely to go to war, but there remains the real risk here: America’s rapid slide into irrelevance.

If other countries - allies and “competitors” alike - are left to filter every utterance of of the US president as something he didn’t really mean, why would they ever take him seriously? If government policies are spur-of-the-moment thoughts that are reversed a day or a week or a month later, why would they take them into account? And if our actions show that our word cannot be relied on, why would anyone ever sign any agreement with us? So we end up with a world where the US gets shunted off to the kiddy table, humoured but largely ignored, while the grown-ups talk business. And there will be nothing we can do to stop it.

I guess that’s what “making America great again” looks like. Enjoy our last gasps as “leader of the free world” because that shit is over.

94

It’s curiouser and curiouser. Perhaps the fact that Trump said it, makes it fake.

95

Well, it seems you forgot the most important part of my post.

The part about a despot with nuclear weapons and a desire to destroy his enemies.
Did you know NK has the deepest subway system in the world? (Opulent, palatial subway system has few stops, but at least it doubles as a bomb shelter)

And yes. Field artillery will destroy a city. A destroyed city leaves the citizens homeless, without food or other means to meet their needs. How long does it tale an army to march 30 to 35 miles? A day, less?

North Korea has a prodigious amount of artillery, especially long-range artillery pieces. One of the major concerns about a North-South war is that the North would be able to unleash a devastating artillery barrage on the South Korean capital of Seoul. Such an attack, by thousands of artillery pieces on a population of 24,000,000 is widely believed to be capable of killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and “flattening” Seoul in the span of half an hour.

Now add multiple rocket launchers, ballistic missiles and chemical weapons and it’s clear the only chance Seoul stands is one involving peace, and Trump doesn’t inspire confidence with respect to that.

96

We’ve had some very reassuring news. Turns out, the phone call was not a “spur of the moment”, destabilizing and potentially disastrous ploy. It had been in the works for some time, staff on both sides, so it was a carefully considered destabilizing and potentially disastrous ploy.

I am reassured. How about you?

97

We’re not attacking the substance of his policies. We’re attacking his behavior. And if HE would wait until he is President to start acting like an idiot, we would, too.

My bold. You’re doing that normalizing thing where you downplay the craziness of what he is doing. In fact your whole absurd statement makes me chuckle. Calling Taiwan (before he is President) is the same as Obama (who BTW **is **President) calling the Dalai Lama. Oh, baby, if you can’t see the absurdity of making those two things the same… :smack:

My bold. No…that’s not the only thing that matters… But you get points for trying to distract/change the subject.

98

The answer will vary a bit based on conditioning, terrain (road march vs bushwhacking through the backcountry), weather, etc, but I believe the US Army expects 4 MPH on a ruck march. I don’t think they intend to sustain that rate for eight hours straight and fight a battle at the end of it (or, more likely in the case of North Korea invading the South, all along the route). I suspect the conditioning of the North Korean Army to lag behind ours by a good bit. In short, it’s at least a long, full day’s march, probably two. Are you envisioning that they’d assemble on their side of the DMZ and then start marching in the morning, and be in Seoul by nightfall? That’s probably an unrealistic expectation. Also, we’d almost certainly notice it if many thousands of soldiers started assembling on their side of the DMZ.

Your original claim was “Same thing in Korea. If NK mobilized its 8 million reserve and active troops, they could roll over SK before the news hit the US.” That’s not correct. They couldn’t even mobilize a fraction of their reserves without news of it hitting the US, and the US taking steps to counter the mobilization. They have the capability to cause massive destruction to Seoul, but killing lots of South Koreans in Seoul through an artillery barrage does not somehow magically give them control of all of South Korea, or anything even close to that.

99

I hope it never happens, and certainly hope if anything escalates, it’s not on Trump’s watch. But here’s a scenario of how it might play out. And it’s bad news for South Korea which is bad news for the US.

Former White house adviser Victor Cha described how a North Korean invasion would likely play out in his book, The Impossible State.

*Special forces would invade first in a series of predawn airdrops and shore landings, sabotaging power stations, communication networks and bridges in order to “paralyse the population”.

Then “the largest artillery force in the world” would pound the South Korean capital Seoul with shells at a rate of 500,000 per hour — leaving its people only 45 seconds to take cover.

An arsenal of 600 chemically-armed missiles would cripple airports, making escape impossible, while 100 more trained on Japan would slow the arrival of US reinforcements.*
…

*Any forces that do attempt to cross the Tsushima Strait * [US forces from Japan] *into the South face waters infested with Kim’s submarines, all of them told to torpedo American supply ships.
*
In the meantime 700,000 North Korean troops and 2,000 tanks would pour across the border, with invasion tunnels discovered as deep as 475ft down — some capable of shifting 30,000 fighters an hour.

What scares me is how unprepared Trump is for any of this, and how, most likely, his ego will result in a knee-jerk reaction to Kim Jung-un’s typical, yearly ranting, raving and saber-rattling. Half a million artillery rounds landing on Seoul per hour would devastate that capital, the country and the people. And we’d be in the middle of it.

No think you, Trump isn’t intelligent enough for this. It’s really scary.

100

I agree that North Korea could devastate Seoul with their artillery (or at least the northern portions of it). Beyond that, much of what Victor Cha wrote seems like fantasy. You can’t assemble and prep 700,000 troops and 2,000 tanks just north of the DMZ - the most-heavily guarded and monitored border in the whole damn world - without the US military noticing.

I’d encourage you to read this for what I think is a more realistic assessment of North Korea’s artillery bombardment capabilities. His conclusion is: