That is such an oddly phrased and loaded question that I am unable to answer.
But trying to guess what you are going for: I think the military intervention in South Korea during the Korean war was absolutely necessary. South were being invaded by foreign backed North, and the whole country was overrun besides Jeju and Busan. US troops re-established the border. I think this was acceptable.
But for example the Cuban embargo for all these decades? I think that’s nothing but schoolyard bullying. The big kid US doesn’t like what clothes that new kid Cuba is wearing or the friends he has, and tells all their buddies to pick on Cuba. Not cool.
Similarly with NK these days: the US worked with South Korea to construct a naval base capable of serving US nuclear warships. Now let’s think for a minute if for example Russia decided to do the same just across the border from the US. Hmm. Why do I have a feeling we’ve seen this before…
But as I said, I’m not an analyst or a politician. This is just my impressions of the situation. Quite frankly I don’t know everything that’s involved. Based on the interviews we did with North Korean refugees, and what I heard from crew who had filmed in NK, it appeared that the situation and living standards were quite dreadful. The black market trade across the Chinese border alleviated that, and they could do subsistence farming (illegal but not policed). In Pyongyang I think the situation isn’t quite so bad but most of the country is not Pyongyang.
That is a somewhat misleading picture of what happened.
Before the war, there was no North and South Korea; there was just Korea, occupied by Japan. After WWII, it ended up with the USSR occupying the north and the USA occupying the south.
The US installed Syngman Rhee as the head of a right-wing puppet government in the south. Rhee had spent WWII hiding in the USA (after being thrown out of a prewar Korean government for corruption), and immediately set about imprisoning/killing the South Korean left.
The government of the north did not accept the legitimacy of the partition, and eventually invaded the south (mostly on their own; the Chinese weren’t in it yet) in an attempt to reunify the country. Although they nearly succeeded early on, MacArthur’s Inchon counterattack forced them into retreat.
Rather than reestablishing the partition, MacArthur instead chased the North Koreans all the way to the Chinese border, all the while loudly discussing his desire to continue the attack into China. Then the Chinese got involved, and fought the boundary back to where it remains today.
During this process, the US and allied forces killed twenty percent of the North Korean population (and quite a few South Koreans as well).
I’m not here to defend and exalt every US Cold war move and decision. The practical methods of both sides were comparably brutal - but the the end-states they wished to bring about differed markedly.
so, US interventionism may be the only way to help relieve the humanitarian crisis caused by US imperialism, more or less?
There may well be other options, 60 years on, to the interpretations available. ONLY is a pretty much useless word when it comes to what people might do to help. There is ONLY one course when there is a bully afoot.
Hey, my dad’s family is 100% Czech who came from Prague. Only they moved over here in the late 1800s and settled in central Texas. My grandma had a Czech accent even though she was born here, it was her first language. My uncle who has a doctorate in music goes back there ever so often and had a guy help trace our linage back to the late 1500s.
My ex-Mother-in-Law came here from Poland during the late 60s. I need to ask her how she swung that. Her dad was a hero in the Home Army and the commies put him in prison for awhile because he wouldn’t sign party loyalty papers.
You have no idea how much worse it was on the other side of the Iron curtain, in pretty much every way. And how much the situation has improved after the Velvet revolution.
Annoyingly, Wikipedia doesn’t break down civilian deaths by side, but I’d be willing to bet that the US-backed side killed more if only for the strategic differences. You know, the US goal being “kill as many people as possible” while the sinosphere goal was to actually effectively fight a war. Out of curiosity (sorry if I’m prying, I really like hearing peoples’ stories from the other side of the cold war,) did you get out of there before or after the fall of the soviet bloc?
As far as getting back on topic, I find it kind of interesting that nobody’s proposed what seems like an obvious solution if only because they know there’s no way that the US would agree to it
China wants to keep NK as a buffer state because the US has heavily militarized South Korea, and North Korea needs to dump all of its resources into its army because the US has heavily militarized South Korea. What happens if the US agrees to draw out of South Korea?
It doesn’t decrease defensive capability that much, the US could probably land troops on the Korean peninsula within a day from Japan, but it totally wipes out any possibility of a non-obvious offense.
The middle estimate of murders of civilians given by Wiki (Vietnam War casualties - Wikipedia) lists some 90k by South Vietnam, 6k by the US forces and 215k by the North. Keep in mind that (despite wartime censorship), news of the massacres was getting to the US and the government had to care about the public opinion. No news was getting to China and the politburo wasn’t bound by popular support in the first place.
Even if you wish to be completely cynical about the motivations of the US forces, they needed to leave behind a stable, governable state half the world over to achieve any of their goals. “Kill everyone” was definitely not the way to accomplish that.
That might be one reason, or the explained reason. The main or “real” reason is you need a large military if you plan on running an oppressive authoritarian regime with the propaganda that this oppressive military is the only thing between you and the baby eaters and mama rapers of the south.
Nothing. The military presence of the US is fairly small, at <24,000 personnel. This is a tiny fraction of the nearly half a million South Korean forces. Even if they US withdrew boots on the ground, they are still committed to help SK as an ally if there was an attack and can do so from other bases and/or the Navy.
Though maybe, perhaps, if the US presence was the one reason they wouldn’t open talks with SK. But given their willingness to meet now, not sure that is the case.
I didn’t get out. I’m still “here”. I was born before the regime collapsed and I have fortunately outlived it.
Hard to tell. Just like with the Cuban crisis, most effects would probably derive from the perceived symbolic strength or weakness of the move. It could work. Or it could seriously undermine the US alliance structure in the Pacific. I suspect it could very well embolden mainland China to reclaim Taiwan.
Yes, that’s true, it’s a port for supply and to launch operations. But pulling the boots out doesn’t mean we wouldn’t regain access if something happened. The Navy has lots of other bases in the region to resupply, and on the water they are mobile bases. The SK air force is a little dated, but I am fairly confident they are more than a match for the NK Migs.
We use SK as an asset and a resource, but SK has its own formidable military.
Huh I actually have plenty of ideas. Books and stuff! I do think America has its horrors, like its prison system, that would rival the entire Soviet/Eastern Bloc. I’m glad that you survived whatever you survived to be able to spin fantasies about the USA!
The world doesn’t consist only of US and Eastern Bloc. I’m happy to admit that US is going overboard in a number of ways, including the prison system. But it’s not a gulag. You don’t get there because your neighbor accused you of harboring anti-governmental sympathies. When you get there, you don’t get repeatedly systematically beaten purple with rubber hoses. And when you are there, you generally don’t die of exposure, starvation or exhaustion with something like a 70% probability.
I have spent quite some time in the US and the country is so prosperous and well-off that you have entirely lost any sense of what real misery looks like. Yes, US prisons suck. Particularly the privately run ones (which is just insanity in principle). If you don’t like it, do something about it. You’re unlikely to get on Norway’s level but surely German corrections standards are within your reach. Start a movement (you can actually legally do that in the US!), gather votes, pressure the parties, support the right candidates in the primaries. Or, you know, moan about it on the internet, imagining how awesome communism would be.
Ah, I just went into the vietnam war, I didn’t see the casualty breakdown. Wiki’s section says 290k total from the north, 287 from the south and the US, about half and half. I figured that the US’ carpet bombing would’ve bumped the number up quite a bit (and it does if we include Cambodia’s bombing as part of the war, wiki says that the US killed let’s say 100k people in Cambodia by bombing for a middle, round esitmate.)
But then there’s Agent Orange… Even if we call bull on the Vietnamese government’s numbers and halve them, that killed 200,000 people. There were concerns raised about this at the time although the US (and British before them,) ignored those concerns.In 66 (when the program was officially confirmed,) the US was charged with violating the Geneva Convention by using it, although between the US and its allies the resolution didn’t pass. They argued that its efficacy as a chemical weapon, if it had any, was simply a side effect. Wiki also says that almost half of the spraying was focused on destroying food rather than jungle where enemy combatants may be hiding but it doesn’t say if that’s included in the official casualty figure. Further up Wiki says the intent of that wasn’t technically to starve people, but to force them into the cities which the US had a stronger hold on.
I’m not sure we would’ve had Iraq if the US government was capable of understanding that first bit
As far as the second, I didn’t say kill everyone, but the US policy for the war, as you can find a general at the time talking about, was to kill as many enemies as possible. You’d go in, search and destroy, then go right back out without actually holding the territory.
…and now I look back at the original wiki page and it lists estimates in the box. Oh well, looking at the casualties page gave a lot more interesting depth to the post.
