Boy, at a time when the stakes are so high it sure is good to know that the Trump administration has put so much effort toward maintaining strong diplomatic relations with South Korea.
Oh, right. Trump still hasn’t even appointed an ambassador.
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I think what’s more likely is that South Korea will eventually push the US to remove its troops from the DMZ. The fact that we don’t even have a high level representative in regular contact with the South Korean government means we’re losing our grip on them it seems.
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I’m starting to feel like Trump bringing the world together in opposition to the USA is America’s karmic punishment for failing to bring the world together in support of us after 9/11.
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The world was largely unified in support of America after 9/11. Cities around the world held moments of silence for the victims and everything. Then Bush ruined it almost immediately by going to war against Afghanistan (which was only tangentially responsible for the attacks) and Iraq (which had nothing to do with 9/11 whatsoever).
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NK doesn’t want to nuke SK, they want to take it over and just be Korea. The nukes are for stopping the US getting involved.
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Yeah, no, that’s what I meant, perhaps “squandering the opportunity…” would have been a better turn of phrase…
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At a guess they have looked at how poorly Trump has negotiated everything else in his life, and that he likes dictators so has no moral issues with NK, and figure they may get a good deal that Trump will largely ignore, but maybe Trump’s successors will honor. Or maybe they hope Trump will actually do them because they probably cost Trump less money anyway (“stop holding so many war-games where you put a battle fleet off NK and pretend to invade”, “drop or reduce economic sanctions”, “do you really need military bases in SK? If so, maybe you could downsize them a bit?”).
It is probably worth a try. They may actually get a sweetheart deal since Trump doesn’t care if people think he is cozy with a(nother) dictator.
From Trump’s point of view things are also good, if NK makes any grand sounding promises then he has a foreign policy victory to crow about. “Look how the democrats could never get peace and I finally did!”, and can ignore everyone that says he gave NK too good of a deal.
I mean the only people that have anything to lose here are South Korea, and the American public, and we already know he doesn’t care about any o those people (and to be honest SK has way more to lose here then we do).
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I’d say it was really the Iraq invasion. The rest of the world pretty much did agree with the Afghanistan invasion, since the Taliban did harbor a lot of al-Qaida leaders and fighters, and refused to play ball over them.
Now, the Iraq thing, that was what did in the sympathy people had for America. It was such an obviously needless thing, a war of choice instead of necessity, and the Bush admin really did a bad job trying to sell it to anyone who wasn’t ready to accept their word on everything at face value. (Not to mention that the pivot to Iraq took away the attention and the resources that would have been vital in stabilizing Afghanistan. Thus, instead of a hopefully fixed Afghanistan, we ended up with fucked up Afghanistan and smashed-up, broken Iraq.)
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Seriously? Has China ceased to exist?
Next up, Canada needs nukes to protect us from Russia.
Well, except for that invasion business :-).
Anyway, colour me just a tiny bit skeptical that that’s all it would take.
May the world one day make you pay for that image…
Old news. US troops have not patrolled the DMV for decades. And for a while they have been handing over the bases on the DMZ to the ROK Military. I believe the shift started in the mid 1990s with a big push in the early 2000s. Maybe you have the DMZ confused with having USFK leaving Korea?
I am Korean American
I lived in Korea both as a Soldier and a Civillian.
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so, this scenario isn’t credible?
For years North Korea has had extensive batteries of conventional artillery—an estimated 8,000 big guns—just north of the demilitarized zone (DMZ), which is less than 40 miles from Seoul, South Korea’s capital, a metropolitan area of more than 25 million people. One high-ranking U.S. military officer who commanded forces in the Korean theater, now retired, told me he’d heard estimates that if a grid were laid across Seoul dividing it into three-square-foot blocks, these guns could, within hours, “pepper every single one.” This ability to rain ruin on the city is a potent existential threat to South Korea’s largest population center, its government, and its economic anchor. Shells could also deliver chemical and biological weapons. Adding nuclear ICBMs to this arsenal would put many more cities in the same position as Seoul. Nuclear-tipped ICBMs, according to Lewis, are the final piece of a defensive strategy “to keep Trump from doing anything regrettable after Kim Jong Un obliterates Seoul and Tokyo.”
How does this rank alongside NATO’s plan to invade Russia with a couple of brigades in estonia and poland?
I’m far from an expert, but… yeah, that’s fairly credible.
Nobody outside North Korean military knows exactly how many artillery pieces there are aimed at Seoul, how many of them are actually in working condition, how much ammo they have and whether that ammo is in working condition, how much counterbattery fire the firing positions could withstand, and so on. It’s almost certain that NK’s ability to wreck Seoul is far lower in reality than in the worst-case scenarios. However, nobody knows how much lower it is – and in any case, even without the use of chemical weapons, it would even in the best case cause a hell of a lot of disruption, damage, and deaths in Seoul.
Dunno if you’re sarcastic, but the point of those brigades is to ensure that if Russia decides to go for broke and rolls over the borders, NATO will be involved. So it’s a combination of a tripwire and a deterrent. “You invade Estonia, you’re at war with the rest of the NATO”, basically.
Yet this “tripwire” is denounced as an aggressive posture by Russian apologists-- even as Russia grabs large chunks of Ukraine…
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How did you get from me saying all NK has ever wanted was for us to stop the mock invasions each year (why the NK repel strategy exists) to suggesting that I might think the intelligence we have on their gun emplacements isn’t credible?
The hardened artillery bunkers in the mountains of NK are a well known NK asset and their stated defense strategy of “repel” has always publically included the threat of a devastating unstoppable artillery strike on Seoul.
At this point you may be right. It’s been over 60 years and by now the animonisty we have built up with our yearly mock invasion must have taken a severe psychological toll on the people and leadership of NK. We just may have done too much damage to heal simply by stopping the mock invasions. It may also take some good faith efforts on our part.
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Maybe Kim said he might “drop his nukes” and they misunderstood?
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Some Koreans are very scared of a possible US invasion:
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I’m a civilian, never served (never will) in the military, so I see the DMZ just as a placeholder for the whole military presence there in South Korea. That’s the obvious end goal of the North Korean regime is to see the US entirely off of the peninsula. And at this point since the US government (really, Trump’s administration) isn’t keeping regular contact with the South Koreans means whatever influence we have over there is greatly diminished. There’s literally no one high level for either country at this point and it doesn’t look like Tillerson nor Trump are trying to fast track replacements. So my point still stands despite the technicality.
