No, the war only starts if the US retaliates against such an attack by attacking or invading North Korea. Have we forgotten that the North Koreans sank a South Korean warship in 2010, and how that did not start a war?
It’s an insane definition of “start a war” that excludes the original hostile act. That’s like saying the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor did not “start a war” because it took the US response to make it a full-blown war. You and I live in completely different universes if you think that makes sense.
A terrorist attack might make him more popular, especially if the perpetrator was a member of a group that Trump has slammed a lot.
I think war with North Korea would be the end of his presidency. I can’t foresee war starting unless there’s a giant fuckup on Trump’s part. Either US preemptively attacks or Trump leads NoKo to think there will be a preemptive attack.
Are you envisioning that a Republican Congress would impeach President Trump in the middle of a war with North Korea? Or perhaps that President Trump’s cabinet would remove him from office in the middle of said war? That seems plausible in your mind?
There are 37,500 American troops in South Korea.
I don’t see the cabinet removing Trump from a war with North Korea; in fact, I think he and ‘his’ generals are aligned in their thinking. The deconstruction of the State Department and emasculation of our highest diplomat is telling - it tells me that North Korea is being approached as a military problem, not a diplomatic one.
North Korea’s strategic value isn’t obvious at first, until you consider what happens to the region if you have an assertive nuclear state that ignores American power without repercussions. That sends the signal that American power is overstated, that it’s a paper tiger. The United States has never been in Asia purely for the purposes of defending other Asian states; we’ve been there all along to be project power. Initially that projected power was intended to intimidate and contain the Soviets (and to a lesser extent China), but since the end of the Cold War, we’ve remained there to project power to others. To some of our allies, our presence of a superpower has given them confidence that the region will remain stable so that they can focus on internal matters like economics and crime. North Korea’s daring missile and nuclear tests challenge that assumption. The United States has had no answer, and this is not going unnoticed by other states in the region.
Part of the reason we’ve had no answer is that the assumption has been North Korea would never really want a war with anyone, which is probably correct. But in the event that it did, the United States has always felt comfortable knowing that if a war did break out, the consequences to us would be nothing compared to the consequences North Korea would face. Now, increasingly, this mother of all assumptions is doubt as well. It’s a red line for some, I would imagine.
The idea that Trump would start a war as a distraction is fallacious - it wouldn’t be a distraction. A war with North Korea would enjoy at least some political legitimacy. Even his fiercest critics would have to acknowledge that North Korea’s regime is behaving dangerously - hell even China realizes this now. What should concern everyone is that a war of this magnitude would obviously result in massive destruction abroad, with economic consequences here, too. More than that, it will almost inevitably strengthen the demand for a security state. And with this administration, I seriously doubt there’s going to be an internal debate, much less a public one, about striking the right balance between security and liberty.
It might have changed since I last saw it but I think Rumsfeld cut it to about 28000 or so in his regional realignment. (some went to Guam, I think). Part of that was at the request of a left-leaning Korean president who said we had too much of a presence there.
I was going by the data for 2017 in the wikipedia article. But even if the article is wrong, and the number is 28,500 the point is the same.
To clarify what I said: Kim can and might attack our military forces in the region. But he can’t bring the fight to us. And that would make a huge difference in public perception. If he just attacks our military, then we have the option of withdrawing and possibly making slow preparations for a counterattack, or even withdrawing and ignoring that part of the world (I’m not saying that those would be good options, but they’d be options). And people could say that we shouldn’t have been there in the first place. It’s different if someone strikes us at home, like the 9-11 attackers did.
It’s different, but if Kim attacked US troops in S. Korea, that might well start a war, and it would be started by Kim attacking us. We could withdraw, but I think the sentiment in the US would be to attack back, and folks would blame Kim for the attack, not Trump. And they would be correct.
I think people would have very little sympathy for Kim if he “just attacked our military.” People would be demanding North Korean blood. There would be unfortunately a lot of vocal critics who would question Trump’s behavior during a time of crisis, but my guess is that they would be under enormous pressure to be measured in their response. The president would almost certainly see his popularity ratings rise, if for no other reason than the fact that his generals would get a lot more attention. This country trusts its generals - whether we necessarily and always should is another matter.
I basically agree with you on how the country would perceive the situation, but war with North Korea is still absolutely avoidable, and he’s making increasingly unavoidable. It suits his and his party’s purposes after all. A war with North Korea would also surely immediately raise the threat of a war with Iran not long after. There’s no way Iran would remain committed to denuclearization after a war with North Korea. Russia might also have something to say about our designs on Iran, too.
I’m not so sure about that. The logic for “nuclearization” is that it makes you immune from and attack by the US. If it turns out that makes you more likely to be attacked by the US, then it loses a large part of its allure. And there are other powers, including some in Europe, that have a strong interest in making sure Iran does not “nuclearize”. If Iran broke the nuclear deal because of something the US did in NK, they would invoke the ire of more than just the US.
But Iran already assumes that the United States will attack it anyway. They would probably do some back channel negotiating with Russia to get some protection. Russia has no interest in seeing the US expand its role in the Middle East - it has seen enough. Putin sees the United States as an existential threat to his survival as well, which explains a lot of his behavior since 2008. Russia would probably support Iran the same way they supported Syria. Not because they have any special affinity for Iran but because it’s in their interests not to allow the US to control the region. If the US were, against its better senses, to attack Iran, the question would then be how long before a US-Iran war becomes a global war. There are a lot of terrifying scenarios that could come out of a war with Iran.
There are other actions that can be taken against Iran besides “war”, especially if Europe is with us. They will be if Iran violates the nuclear agreement.
Why do you think Putin is fueling right wing nationalism in Europe? Austria now has a right wing nationalist coalition. Poland has a right wing authoritarian government. There is Brexit. There is the Alternative for Germany and a fractured coalition in Germany right now. There is of course LePen in France, who might not be president but isn’t going away anytime soon. The support that the United States would get in committing more troops and money to what many would regard as a disastrous and self-serving intervention against Iran would be lukewarm at best, especially if the United States were to radically change the global political dynamic by having a war with North Korea that many globally view as completely avoidable. The United States would have the support of Israel and Saudi Arabia - and that’s probably about it. And those are not two countries that we can count on to deescalate tensions. If anything, it’ll be the polar opposite. With Trump at the helm, we are, as I’ve mentioned many times over, undergoing an authoritarian makeover ourselves, but more than that, we’re also witnessing the end of American global power as we know it. We’re exiting the age of global cooperation and entering the era of global realignment and competition - and it’s a dark age at that.
I said there were other things besides war that could happen to Iran. I’m not sure why you are arguing as if I was saying Europe would join in a war with the US. If somehow I gave you that impression, I’m sorry. That is not at all what I meant. We could get Europe to agree to go back to damaging sanctions against Iran, which they really don’t want.
Again, going back to the original exercise in thought, we’re hypothesizing an imaginary conflict with North Korea and what impact that this sort of generally ill-advised and globally unpopular American-led assault would have on Iran’s behavior, particularly as it relates to the development of its nuclear and other weapons programs. The world in which an American-led coalition imposes sanctions on Iran is the world of 2012-16, which is not necessarily the world of 2017-2021. The rest of the world is deeply skeptical of our foreign relations under Trump, who seems to favor a worldview of isolationism and a corollary to the corollary of the Monroe Doctrine. It wouldn’t be as easy as phoning up the UNSC or the EU and saying “Okay, time for sanctions.”
The Europe of 2017 is just as interested in keeping Iran free of nuclear weapons as was the Europe of 2012. If anything, even more so. European governments aren’t going to care about Trump if the issue is taking actions to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. We’ve been hearing about “the drumbeats for war with Iran” since the Bush era, and folks have been wrong every time. Our getting involved in Syria was much more likely to spark conflict with Iran than anything we could do to NK.
Not quite, that’s because our involvement in Syria began under a president who really didn’t want to be involved in any more wars to begin with, particularly in light of the fact that he ran on a (admittedly watered down and weak) 2000s version of an anti-war platform. The current administration is full of people who believe war with Iran is inevitable. Even the globalist Europeans who currently drive the agenda throughout much of Europe are skeptical of Trumpian policy. They’re not blind. They’re no friend of Iran’s Ayatollah but they’re increasingly acutely aware that American foreign policy is no longer credible.