I have no idea, but I wonder if Trump does something that compels Mattis or McMaster to resign.
Re: firing missiles at Guam…that would be a terribly provocative move and I can’t imagine NK actually following through with it unless they’re miscalculating Trump’s will to respond. That’s one of the many problems with this current conflict. It’s not just Trump but also Kim Jung Un who for whatever reason has determined that he has to be even more daring, ballsy, deranged, and scarier than his father, probably as a way to fend off senior military or political opponents in NK who might have been tempted to test his strength being that he is so young. It’s not just Trump, it’s Trump and Kim and the interplay between these two that makes this combustible.
NK is a very long way from deploying reliable ICBMs that are capable of delivering nuclear warheads to San Francisco.
The fact is, they don’t need to. Trump is handing them their goal of being recognized as a major player in world politics. Trump is treating them as an equal.
Why would refusing even be considered a possibility? The military is not in the business of disobeying the legal orders of the Commander in Chief. You can’t seriously think the United States armed services is going to engineer a coup, which is basically what refusing the President’s orders would amount to.
Trump & KJU are but a walking shadows, poor players
That strut and fret their hour upon the stage
And then are heard no more. It is a tale
Told by idiots, full of fire and fury,
Signifying nothing.
These two ass clowns are nothing but internet tough talking cowards. Sending public missives at one another in a comical exchange of empty threats. Neither one willing to throw the first punch because they are actually too afraid of the consequences. As they should be. It would be funny if it wasn’t such a pathetic display of weakling rhetoric by intellectually deficient tinpot despots.
Whether it is 1 year or 20 years, is it wise to keep up the Clinton/Bush/Obama method of sanctions when we can see that there will come a time in the near future when NK has such a capability and that military strike is no longer an option?
And that is the best case: We have a second cold war and hope we don’t get nuked. Worse case is that the guy is a madman and will nuke us for the hell of it.
Millions of potential dead today as well as potentially trillions in destroyed or otherwise lost treasure, verse uncertainty in the future, a future that might end in the same way the old Soviet Union went out, despite having orders of magnitude more weapons that North Korea will ever have. Yeah…I think that’s a better option. Probably why those presidents kicked the can down the road instead of taking on the regime head on and precipitating what will be a major conflict with a major loss of life.
Hard to reconcile the second of these with the first unless believes that a “wargasm” is not a very frightening thing.
That said I also do not see too many great choices that any administration would have.
It certainly does not help to have an American president setting himself up like in a bad cartoon, but at some point a not-response is even more dangerous than a response. It also does not help that we have an administration that has undermined the diplomatic corp at State and lost many of the career staff.
The only hope one can have is that China recognizes that their best interests are served by their putting their full weight behind getting NK to stand down. The last UN vote and China’s subsequent statement that they saw the situation coming to a “crisis point” can be read as that recognition occurring.
The price would be China being seen as the sane and stable partner in the region, not the United States, with no NK regime change and still having some nuclear capacity, just frozen at current levels. But on balance a very small price in comparison to any likely other.
The point of the former post then was folks were whipping themselves into a frenzy that NK was going to attack *this very week * :eek: or DJT was going to preempt this very week. It’s been 4 months and essentially nothing has changed IMO. Actual hostilities are not imminent IMO. It’s now historical fact that hostilities were not imminent in April 2017.
The point of the latter post was that once hostilities do start, NK is toast. The US will not settle for another 75-year stalemate across a DMZ. That was true in e.g. 1970 and 1990, and is certainly true in 2017. I expect it will still be true in 2025 while NK continues much as they have been.
*If *hostilites commence, how exactly NK ceases to exist and how much of their former territory is controlled by China and how much by SK is very much an open question. IMO an independent country on the land formerly known as the DPRK is not gonna happen. Neither major power wants that.
I’m not seeing those as terribly inconsistent perspectives.
Agree with the rest of your analysis. DJT has slowly painted us deeper into a stupider place. China has an opportunity to step up and be a real statesman here. Not for our sake, but in the legit pursuit of their own long term objectives intelligently defined. Which may have the effect of saving the US from the worst consequences of the unstable leadership we elected.
But if we attack now, we can guarantee that we will not get nuked. We cannot guarantee that in a few years.
As I said, I am not in favor of war yet, but are we sure that NK is just bluffing and blustering or will they attack given the first real chance? Yes, that would be suicide for them, but can we trust that we are not dealing with a true madman over there?
[QUOTE=UltraVires]
But if we attack now, we can guarantee that we will not get nuked. We cannot guarantee that in a few years.
[/QUOTE]
If by ‘we’ you mean only the US, well…that’s probably true. We certainly would mitigate it somewhat…at the cost of 10’s of thousands and potentially millions of lost lives and a major economic downturn globally.
As for your second point, we ‘guarantee’ that we don’t take a nuke exactly the same way we ensure Russia (who has 2 orders of magnitude more nukes than NK does) or China (who has 10 times more) doesn’t nuke us…by MAD. I don’t personally believe that lil’ Kimmy 3.0 or his merry men will just fly off the handle and nuke the US or anyone else. What I think is that Kimmy et al believe that nukes will be a magic wand for them…having them will ensure that they don’t go out like the Kaddaffi Duck or Saddam. But that’s the wrong lesson to have learned, IMHO.
No…just like we don’t trust those guys in charge of China or Russia. Anyone who would trust Putin OR Xi (or Trump for that matter) is an idiot. Trust doesn’t come into it. The assurance that NK WILL be destroyed if it uses a nuke should be enough. The only way I can see this not being the case is if, once things really start to go TU for the NKs, the regime feels there is nothing it can do and they are inevitably going down, someone might decide fuck it…might as well go out in the blaze of glory. But I see that as a lower probability than there is a regime change due to a popular uprising or one of Kimmy’s generals (or someone else) taking him out and a transition to something else happens. At this stage even if it were 50/50 that NK would go out in a blaze of glory it’s a better bet to wait, continue to kick the can down the road and hope for the best than to unleash what it would take to get rid of the regime by force of arms today.
Perhaps Trump and Kim are equals. Trump is antagonizing Kim, and turning his attention away from Germany and other countries led by adults, because he wants to fight in his own weight-class.
Trump’s approval is still almost 40%. He can use a suspenseful or military diversion in Korea to increase that to 44% at least. That will be plenty to win elections given gerrymandering and on-going voter suppression policies.
(Trump could win another one, but is getting old. Who will be President next time? Is Pence the strong favorite?)
[QUOTE= New York Times]
On Thursday, the conservative pundit Rush Limbaugh praised President Trump on his radio show for his display of machismo, contrasting him with his predecessor, Barack Obama.
“We don’t have a pajama boy who wears mom jeans who can barely throw a baseball, a first pitch, at a Nationals game, as president,” he said. “We have somebody out there who’s no-nonsense, and who’s not going to take this.”
…
Jennifer Scott made preparations for an animal auction at the Morgan County Fair in Brush, Colo. “I think we have to go guns blazing and let them have it,” she said, referring to North Korea.
[/QUOTE]
America, bless its heart, is with Trump. I assume some adults have whispered to Xi of China “Don’t worry, we won’t let him get out of hand. Play along, will you? Let’s not make this any more embarrassing for the whole world than we have to.” Or … is Xi delighted to see the U.S. led so haplessly? North Korea’s Kim is delighted of course, and I’m pretty sure Putin is as well.
Now that the existence proof is on the table — that America will elect a demagogue — politics may get worse and worse. Everyone has been saying “Trump makes me like Bush-43 better.” If the GOP can elect a more competent tyrant, our children may be saying “Trump was better than this.”
Xi has his own problems, and he’d be rather a guy with a glass country throwing stones at glass houses if he thought our system was dysfunctional. I doubt anyone is telling him to play along…or that what he’s doing aren’t for his own, internal reasons. Right now, he’s focused on the bloodletting for the upcoming congress, where (he hopes) heads will roll, and they won’t be his or his factions.
NPR was saying the other day that China theoretically has a mutual defence pact with North Korea, so yes, in theory they have a legal obligation to defend North Korea.
That being said, China is run by people who are a lot more reasonable than either The Donald or The Kim, so I suspect if push came to shove they’d abrogate the treaty.
What if the President’s goal is regime change in North Korea? One way to achieve that is through “some plan of attack or invasion”. Of course the military would obey. I’m sure his advisers would counsel him about the consequences, and give as realistic estimates as they can on costs and casualties, but at the end of the day if the President decides it’s worth it, and gives the order to proceed, then they will.
IMHO, war with North Korea is still, at present, the worst outcome.
I doubt it’s so clear cut. China’s between a rock and a hard place. They despise that treaty, but they can’t just walk out on it or all of their mutual defense and military related treaties are thrown into chaos.
From what I understand, the calculus actually works out to favor maneuvering for a limited war with the United States. It sounds strange given the modern proclivity for total war, but we managed for hundreds of years to fight wars by negotiated rules (where and when to fight, even what weapons to use in some cases), so it’s entirely possible that belligerents like the United States and China could agree to settle their differences without debellatio, annexation, or regime change in either party as an objective.
I doubt anyone is telling him to play along…or that what he’s doing aren’t for his own, internal reasons. Right now, he’s focused on the bloodletting for the upcoming congress, where (he hopes) heads will roll, and they won’t be his or his factions.