Asia is a place where I’ve done a lot of business, especially the east. It’s a complicated region. China is by far the largest country, and historically it doesn’t get along too well with Japan. Taiwan, legally the Republic of China, gets along very well with Japan, however. What all three parties agree on is that the Koreans are hot-tempered people who don’t know their place.
As far as North Korea is concerned, the chance that it would try to conquer the South is zero. It doesn’t even have the resources for such an endeavor. North Korea wants the U.S. not to attack it, which became its primary concern after the era of neocon invasions began following the Cold War. Fair enough.
One theory holds that the U.S. would like to do so, in order to then deploy its military assets right to the border of China. Another is that it’s fine using the situation to keep them in the current locations. Hopefully, the second one is more plausible, seeing as moving troops towards the Chinese border would trigger military action, no matter how ill-prepared they might be for it. That’s what happened during the Korean War.
As far as a nuclear attack, the last place they’d decided to nuke is the South, which they consider to be their own country under a foreign military occupation. Tokyo would probably be the target, and there wouldn’t be a shortage of South Koreans cheering it on. They really hate the Japanese, who are justifiably quite alarmed about the North Korea situation.
The other two countries bordering North Korea, China and Russia, aren’t too thrilled about the situation either, especially the nuclear tests which could trigger a radioactive landslide. The Chinese have erected extensive border security measures, fearing a mass influx of refugees should the regime collapse. Clearly, they view this as high-potential scenario. Once things kicked off in Ukraine, the Russians basically said, “this would be a good time for our friends in North Korea to test some of those missiles.” Medvedev disclosed this in an interview last year.
As for South Korea, if it was up to the average person, the U.S. military would be gone. They understand they’re being cynically exploited much better than the Taiwanese. Nobody living in a homogeneous, low crime nation would want the U.S. military to occupy it with diversity. That’s especially true in a very nationalistic place that finds it highly objectionable for their women to be sleeping with foreigners, particularly the black ones.
There’s also no enthusiasm for absorbing the North. The West/East German divide was much shorter and far less drastic than what’s happened to Korea. Still, it was an enormous economic and financial challenge to reunite Germany. South Korea probably couldn’t afford to do that with the North. So, even if the government fell in with the North, it would still probably end up as a separate zone of some kind, perhaps indefinitely.
Trump had a really good idea in making a deal with Kim on the nuclear issues. It would’ve ratcheted down tensions with China and removed one of the primary justifications for keeping all of these American troops abroad, rather than on our own border with Mexico. Kim was fine with not devoting so many resources to nukes in exchange for a new status quo in which the U.S. wouldn’t try to regime change him. Yeah, it would’ve been a master stroke of statesmanship that would’ve bolstered Trump’s popularity with voters.
As it turns out, Trump was rather naive in thinking he could hijack a political system that belongs to a plutocracy without consequences and do something that made common sense. His own administration wouldn’t even allow it. All it took to blow the whole thing was that nutjob John Bolton announcing that Kim would be getting the same deal as Qaddafi.
You might recall that Qaddafi had made productive deals with the West, such as stopping African migrants in exchange for a relatively trivial sum of money and agreeing not to produce WMDs in exchange for security guarantees. In return, a revolution was fomented in Libya and it was bombarded. He ended up sodomized to death with a bayonet on television. What was once one of the best places to be an average citizen in the Arab world is a failed state and a massive percentage of them are dead.
My assessment is that Mr. Kim has a pretty reasonable set of concerns that he’s attempting to address with his missile and nuke program. Moreover, both sides of Korea could peacefully come to whatever arrangement they arrived at if left alone. Of course, Uncle Sam won’t leave this situation alone until it literally explodes. Perhaps they’re thinking they can provoke a conflict that will suck China in again, so there’s a viable justification to really kick things off. The entire geopolitical situation is so insane at this point that anything is possible.
I’m proud to officially announce my candidacy for the office of Dogcatcher.
To watch Bolton and Pompeo bitch slap Trump in public was a revelation of just how powerful the Deep State is.
I’d suggest Substack Tom. With your experience and your no-nonsense takes you deserve larger audience. I am sharing it as much as I can.
Yes, also less stigma than being solely attached to a neo-confederate website. More readers
Thanks!