miamizsun wrote:
Good article.  What a tangled web...

"You can't argue (negotiate/compromise/reason) with crazy"

Apply as necessary.

 Coaxial wrote: 
I ain't never told I was good at the mathamaticks.

 ScottFromWyoming wrote: 
Actually the 5th paragraph so he has that going for him.

 Steely_D wrote: 
We did this very effectively against the Russians in the 80's/90's. Too bad that all the wrong people were taking notes.

 islander wrote: 
This is what's confusing me. It looks like Trump is poking the bear and now wondering why it's mad at him.
Before the rhetoric, we certainly had issues with NK but they seemed dormant. Besides testing and developing (and can you really tell someone to not get smarter about something? That's always seemed silly) they hadn't been visibly aggressive. 

Reframe this in the "we have always been at war with..." mentality and it makes sense. The war economy seems desirable to government folks, and it helps get young Americans without jobs off the streets. So this looks completely made up - or Trump is doing a terrible job of explaining why our tax dollars need diverting to this, instead of education and infrastructure. 

—-

And an EMP is still conventional war. A real unconventional war would be subtle long range economic devastation like making the country go into debt as it flails trying to fight a ground war in Afghanistan.

 kurtster wrote: 
Took you until the 4th paragraph to roll out this line. Maybe one day you'll feel comfortable leaving it out altogether.

 kurtster wrote: 
You keep bringing this up, but it's not anything new. North Korea has had the capability of delivering an EMP from space for many years. Why is it now that you want to go to war over it?  Yes it's a threat, but no more than any other threat that they pose, and in need of no different solution.

 kurtster wrote: 
I can't help but that this is propaganda/hyperbole. On the other side, they're likely saying "The President has installed all his family members as his advisors, and cut off relations with all the media except for his propaganda machine. His party is trying to eliminate the non-white vote, and he supports the Klan." And they likely have a similar, or worse, opinion of him as well.

True or not - that's what their media is conveying.

here's a reasonable/rational response to the nk issue (with a little backstory/perspective)

we didn't get into this overnight and we won't get out of it quickly either

if you have two minutes read this

Talk to, Don’t Provoke, North Korea

by Sheldon Richman Posted onApril 29, 2017

 Lazy8 wrote: 
Well I'll go out on a limb and call him asocial and amoral.  He feeds his family members to starving dogs, alive.  He runs concentration camps that make Hitler's and Stalin's Gulags look like summer camps.  He is content to let his people eat bark off of trees in order to survive.  He maintains a fantasy that his family has a divine right to rule based upon some event his grandfather had at a magic mountain.  And we negotiate with someone like this ... how ?

Comparisons to the USSR, the Cold War and any other situation are ludicrous.  This is unique and without precedent given the threat of using thermonuclear weapons offensively.   Our little friend, Chubby Cheeks or Rocket Man or whatever you want to call him, now has the capability and the intent to send one third to one half of North America into the stone age with an EMP that does not require accuracy of any kind.  Is not an EMP device a real threat ?  Does this not qualify as casus belli ?

Casus belli is a Latin expression meaning "an act or event that provokes or is used to justify war" (literally, "a case of war"). A casus belli involves direct offenses or threats against the nation declaring the war, whereas a casus foederis involves offenses or threats against its ally—usually one bound by a mutual defense pact. Either may be considered an act of war.

We are going to contain or prevent this potential EMP how ?  Can you say that we can shoot down an ICBM with 100% certainty to prevent the event right now ?  You are willing to risk a 100 to 300 million people with this certainty ?  If so, then fine, contain the little bastard and wait him out.  I do not share the confidence that we can shoot down an ICBM of this sort with 100% certainty and 99% is not enough.  What if he shoots multiple ICBM's ?  We can get every one of them ?

It is very apparent based upon discussions here over the years that I am about the only one here who even considers an EMP to be a real threat of any kind based upon the remarks I have received over the years when ever I have mentioned it.  Y'all are keeping yourself locked into the box thinking in terms of established conventional war and old paradigms of the past.

How would the survivors of this EMP event judge the leaders who let this happen, when it was preventable ?  People are going to die.  Do we let them die everywhere or in just one place ?  That is the choice.  Diplomacy is at a dead end.  It has done nothing other than take us to this point and decision.

 Lazy8 wrote: 
I suspect that Obama missed an opportunity when Kim Jong Un took over leadership. Obama continued the old cold war stance, iirc increasing sanctions in response to some slight or other that most likely had everything to do with N Korea internal politics and nothing to do with the international situation. And he refused direct talks. Obviously I don't know the whole story but I reckon he should have said, "Look, we really don't give a shit about you, as long as you stay within your little world so do that, and we have no intention of attacking you. We will talk to anyone but don't expect anything to come from it if it doesn't make the world safer and if we can't get other countries on board."

That being said, I had an enlightening conversation with someone who was very tapped in and their advance in capabilities is very troubling. Not the least because there are a lot of Iranian engineers working on missile technology in N Korea.

 aflanigan wrote: 


Very well and neatly said. 

There are limits to the power of any nation. The problem of North Korea's aggressiveness has existed since Truman's presidency and frankly it's not only America's problem to address. North Korea behaves badly in order to draw concessions and indirect aid. It plays on China's fear of a unified Korean peninsula and pro-Western power at it southern border. China also worries that in an alternate scenario, a collapsing North Korea would cause unrest and violence to spill over the border. China in less turbulent times has also played North Korea as bargaining chip with the US, promising to restrain NK in return for American concessions. 

But North Korea's behavior isn't only the concern of the US and China. Existing multilateral arrangements with South Korea, Japan, Russia, SE Asian nations, Australia are reasonable and productive ways to contain NK.  

My guess is that North Korea's leaders understand that no one's wanted to invade and conquer their country for a long time. NK has sufficient conventional weaponry aimed at Seoul alone to cause millions of casualties. NK has a massive army trained for and anticipating a struggle to the death. The country has no concentrations of natural resources or fixed assets worth seizing.

NK's development of long-range missile and nuclear warhead technology is an attempt to force the US, Japan and others to bargain with NK and continue to indirectly subsidize the regime. Yet that threat has very limited effect: Kim Jong Un and his advisers understand that if they strike any country with a nuclear missile, North Korea would suffer a devastating, lethal response. 

I very much doubt that Kim Jong Un is mentally ill, as Buzz worries. American news organizations worried the same thing about his father. Even if his advisers have made Kim paranoid, both the American and North Korean governments tend to buffer and diffuse rash remarks from their leaders about the other country. 

As Steve Bannon remarked to the American Prospect, there isn't a military solution to the problem of North Korea. On the other hand, North Korea loses if it starts a hot war, even just a non-nuclear one. The bigger the conflict and casualties, the more it loses—to the point that it disappears entirely.

Kim and Trump are posturing for their respective domestic audiences. Yes, it's disturbing that we have an incompetent, rash, loud-mouthed loon leading our country and trash-talking at the UN, but Trump's stupidity gets diffused and buffered by other people in the US government and military. 

My question: is this the military threat that the GOP is going to trot out during the '18 and '20 elections to convince people to vote the party line? Because it's pretty pathetic and contrived. At some point this kind of political theater just stops working on voters. 

 buzz wrote:
I have no way to assess the mental state of Kim Jong Un. Maybe those around him do, but I don't.

I don't care what Bernie or Hillary would have done about it. Neither of them is president and both of them are too old to be serious threats to run next time.

Obama did about all that could be done short of war—at least all the hostile things. And that's what makes Trump's bluster such a concern: what if the little weasel calls his bluff? We either go to war over a pointless provocation or we are exposed as a paper tiger. The former would cost us dearly. North Korea has fangs. They couldn't survive a long conflict but they could do an awful lot of damage while they lasted. But without a legitimate casus belli we would be fighting that war alone, without even logistic support from nearby countries.

The latter would embolden the next tinpot dictator, whoever that is, without accomplishing a thing in Korea.

Nuclear weapons are essentially defensive, insurance against an existential threat, but they don't really allow a country to project power. They won't allow Kim to invade South Korea. Using them would be Kim's last act as solid matter, the ultimate in desperate moves. They don't make him a threat any more than Pakistan having nuclear weapons means it can invade India. Our nuclear weapons aren't helping us in Afghanistan any more than the Russian's did. They didn't help us in Vietnam either.

We need to calm down, keep an eye on the real threats posed by Kim's regime, and keep working on ant-missile technology. We're only in a crisis if we make it one.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=trump+teddy+bear+commercial

 R_P wrote: 
Yes, there's that. There's also the fact that the US is the only nation ever to have used the things.

 buzz wrote: 
LOL. U.S. threat of atomic warfare.

 buzz wrote: 
Look at it from the perspective of previous experiences with the USSR. Was their ever a point where we decided, "we've run out of patience, diplomacy and other leverage techniques aren't working quickly enough", and it was time to initiate exchange of nuclear warheads?

It is hard to imagine the years of suffering citizens of North Korea have endured, but our unwillingness to make the situation markedly worse is not a tacit dismissal of their plight. We are not, and never have been, an omnipotent world power. The ability to trigger nuclear holocaust does not signify political omnipotence.  Instead of saying "we have tried diplomacy for 25 years", we should be framing it as, "like we did in dealing with the USSR, we have continued to follow the sane course of pursuing diplomatic and economic options to the extent possible". North Korea's system, like the Soviet Union, is likely to prove unsustainable in the long term. What's the point in firing cannons at a sinking ship that is fully capable of sinking us before it submerges? 

There are no easy answers to this issue, but in response to the neighbour analogy, I can tell you what I would NOT do:  kill my neighbour's family.