The problem with doing something military about North Korea (as opposed to, say, Iraq) is that Trump will either have to flatten the place outright or else fight for every foot of it on the ground, in very difficult terrain, against a huge and reasonably well-equipped army which is fighting on familiar territory and is probably highly motivated to resist. This is something the US military haven’t really done for a long time and the last time they tried (in Vietnam) it didn’t go all that well.
Flattening the place outright is not really an option on geopolitical grounds, but the other thing will probably result in the first POTUS in history with below-zero approval ratings when the first of many body bags come home and people start wondering exactly why a teensy Communist country on the other side of the world is such a menace to the US of A that it merits another long (and very probably illegal) war. Sure, they’re talking a lot about taking nuclear pot-shots at America, but whether they’re actually able to pull that off is an entirely different question. Even so, trying to lean on the Chinese in order to get them to read the NKs the riot act sounds like the altogether more sensible option.
Yup.
NK’s nuclear program is defensive; Bush Jr made it blatantly obvious that building nukes was the only way to avoid being invaded by the US again.
The NK leadership are psychotic bastards, but they don’t appear to be totally stupid.
I read an article in the WaPo over the weekend arguing basically the opposite; Drumpf has let the military off the chain, so now they’re doing all kinds of weird shit without telling the centre what they’re up to.
The MOAB drop really was just the local commander trying to kill a hill with no global subtext, and the CV group sailed away from NK for a while since they already had some fun-times port-visits lined up.
That’s a thought much more frightening than any NK posturing might ever be.
They also don’t really have the capability to nuke the US. Maybe maybe reach Alaska. Though they definitely could hit an ally like Japan and South Korea.
Contrary to NK propaganda, neither the US or SK want to invade NK. They have to keep up appearances that the American dogs are at the gates, ready to rape their women and eat their babies to help justify the world they live in.
It really is like another world. Like I know of other small cults with compounds and the ability to control their members absolutely, but NK is a whole country. There are cracks forming, but I am not sure what they can do about it. There is now a healthy black market of SD chips and DVDs with South Korean shows and movies, giving them a telescope of sorts to the outside world.
China could do all sorts of things to help, but they have their own problems and as long as it is JUST saber rattling, they won’t DO anything.
I know his name! It’s Kim… Jong…
Even Kimchi Breath has military advisers who know that an air blast bomb is not a bunker buster. I prefer the theory that some general noticed that the things’s Best Before date was in a couple of days time and decided it was cheaper to use it than to decommission it.
You would have thought that they would have worked that out after the Ardennes battle. US soldiers do not want to go abroad to die for their country (sensibly).
As far as the Ardennes are concerned, they can count themselves lucky that the bulk of the Wehrmacht was busy fighting the Red Army on the Eastern front. All the D-Day “didn’t we give those Nazis what for” romanticism aside, WWII was really won on the plains of Russia.
Evidently the DPRK’s Air force is a bit of long in the tooth and not very well trained
But the real problem is ““…much of North Korea’s air defense is provided by surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) and antiaircraft artillery (AAA).””
The calculus is a bit off:
- Let’s assume that NK has some sort of missile with nuclear capabilities, but not necessarily the wherewithal to actually get it to hit what it aims at. Maybe it hits Japan, maybe even a random spot in the U.S. Maybe it crashes into the see of fails after launch.
- This means that if it looks like a nuclear strike might be coming, we have to strike first to prevent it; and when we strike, we have to basically level the country.
- If it looks like the regime will fall, it will spend its last hours in a fit of rage aimed at SK and Japan. This is what keeps us from moving in with conventional arms at any given time.
- If enough time passes in isolation, the regime will probably implode. They don’t produce nearly enough food, and fear can only keep peasants in line, not make them productive. The regime must threaten the world for food to keep the peasants alive and in line.
- If NK appears annoyingly dangerous, we stay the course and wait for them to collapse as (4). If it appears truly dangerous, we must destroy them to prevent a nuclear strike as per (2) or an invasion of SK as per (3) above.
- After the dust clears, there are still going to be a mix of starving and battered peasants, fanatical sleeper agents, and surviving elite in NK. The occupation and presumed re-integration of the Koreas would be a hellish exercise for all parties militarily and economically.
NK walks a razor’s edge trying to be menacing but not actually a danger. The question is whether they can walk that edge, and whether the highest levels of power in NK understand that’s the case. I would suspect the latter, but the former is starting to seem unlikely.
The Saudi-9/11 connection is not a basis for anything. The Saudis are a nominally friendly government with deep economic ties, that generally try to violently crack down on these sort of extremists to protect their own good relations with the west. There are rogue elements in the Saudi royalty and government, but that’s not the same as government sponsorship. And that’s also terrorism, not an overt act of war between states.
Also, NK effectively does not exist as a country: no trade. no migration. No true ties of any kind except to China, which hates them.
And I still maintain China would be very tempted to pile on and attack NK first, if for no other reason than to keep an inevitable U.S. occupation force out of the South China Sea, to protect its own sphere of influence.
Because America is going to start winning again.
Read as: pick on the little guy
In the event of a nuclear strike, I don’t think those treaties are going to be considered worth much. There will be half an hour of awkward phone calls as we inform Russia and China that a strike in imminent, and that it would be super-helpful if they told their people not to freak out and start a cascading nuclear conflict that will destroy the world.
The stalemate is driven by the facts that 1) a conflict will damage Japan, 2) a conflict will damage SK, 3) the cost of the conflict itself, and 4) the cost of a long occupation and reconstruction. Until NK is a true international threat, there’s no reason to engage in direct conflict.
I suppose disaster is always relative. The day he was chosen as the Republican candidate was a disaster. The disasters just keep coming!
More likely than not is North Korea is trying to extort money and food from its neighbors through nuclear blackmail.
North Korea can do a lot of damage to key economic centers like Seoul. But an actual conflict will end the regime. They know that. The South Korean military alone is far better equipped and trained. The Norks don’t want the US pushed out because they want US cash and impatience to work for them. So they play this game with crappy missiles and sub-Trinity level atomic testing.
The real fear for me is a North Korean Chernobyl. That the lackidasical attitude the Kim regime has towards safety and the lives of the workers there. A radioactive cloud blowing over many major Asian economic centers cannot be a good thing.
Correction. The Soviets did that first.
Because war is a manly thing to do, consequences be damned. He wants to be seen as a tough guy.
They were getting pretty modern prior to the Soviet invasion, actually. There was still an urban-rural divide, but they had a pretty strong sense of moving towards modernity.
Exactly. Stalin’s comment about the war being won by British brains (magnetron, decryption, bomb aiming), American manufacturing power and Soviet blood was exactly right. Even if he was responsible for there being so many dead Russians and Ukrainians.
