Lol, yeah. Anyone who has a hard time distinguishing between an opposition party and traitors who want to subvert the nation so outsiders can invade it successfully is on a mad power trip. Putin’s horrible and I’m thrilled the crash in oil prices is tanking his economy. Nothing makes a regime more likely to fall to internal pressures than a bad economy. That’s why I’ve always argued we should end humanitarian food aid to North Korea. History is replete with revolts by starving masses.
Timex
1582
Well, while I tend to agree, the reason why folks don’t really want to do such things is twofold:
- People feel bad about making the North Koreans suffer due to their leadership… because, to be clear, they really have no say in their leadership. And frankly, they’re basically already starving. Making them starve more isn’t gonna make them revolt, because they don’t really have the capability to do so. The same kind of goes for the Russians, although the Russian leadership is perhaps less willing to just start murdering their own people at this point than North Korea probably is willing to engage in.
- In its final death throes, North Korea is likely to do something REALLY BAD. Like, launch a nuclear weapon at south Korea, or Japan. Consider this: they just threatened terrorist acts on civilian targets, BECAUSE OF A MOVIE. Not even a serious movie, but rather a stoner comedy about reporters assassinating Kim Jong Un. The sheer insanity of that means that if something of real consequence happened, like we cut off their food and their people do start revolting (which wouldn’t necessarily be successful, but would be problematic for them), then NK’s gonna start doing crazy stuff… because their leadership does not seem to be rationally conscious of the consequences of their actions.
Now, in reality, I am of the opinion that the kind of badness I just described is, without question, going to happen at some point in the future. At some point, NK is going to reach the breaking point, and they are going to nuke someone. The longer you wait, the worse that is going to be. If we had acted in the 90’s under clinton, we could have prevented their acquisition of nuclear weapons. But we didn’t, and now we’ve gotta deal with that.
North Korea isn’t something we can wait out… It’s gonna end baddly, and the longer we wait, the worse it’s gonna be. No one really wants to acknowledge this simple truth, and everyone making policy decisions just wants to kick the can down the road, and leave it for the next guy to deal with.
But seriously, they are threatening terrorist actions over fucking MOVIES. They are batshit crazy, and they have fucking nuclear weapons. It really does not get that much worse than this. Allowing this crap to continue just means they’re gonna expand the range at which they can destroy shit when it finally goes down.
I totally hear where you’re coming from on the DPKR. I’d like to think that they did what they did because there’s really nothing that anyone is going to do about it. I mean sanctions are already in place at the highest level anyone is comfortable with, leadership couldn’t care less about about anyone declaring it a crime, and if anything it might generate an uptick in “reputation” because some people may have guessed they didn’t have the capability to do it. The threat is likewise made with impotency, as it’s just a threat. I don’t doubt that Kim Jong-un is completely nuts, because he’d have to be to run a nation the way that he does, but I’m not quite as certain that he’ll go out with a blast when the time comes. Rather, I think he just wants people to believe that and therefore make it less likely that they push for his removal.
While I tend to agree as well, the can kickers hope that either China intervenes or the Kim dynasty and its supporters fall before the craziness we all rightly fear escalates to nuclear levels. It’s not an impossible hope, but you’re right when you say the results will be worse in the long run if it doesn’t bear fruit.
Timex
1585
China’s in the same boat as we are… they just want NK to go away and stop making trouble. In a lot of ways, they are even more about burying their heads in the sand than we are, as there are cultural elements that want to avoid direct conflict that Americans would not necessarily shy away from.
But the reality is that shit doesn’t just magically fix itself, no matter how much we pray that it will. How many global conflicts have just magically resolved themselves after waiting a long while? Pretty sure the answer’s damn near zero.
China’s nightmare is sixty million North Koreans pouring over the border as refugees. That, and instability on their border that results in either a war down there or a US-allied power right on their doorstep. They aren’t big fans of Pyongyang anymore, but they don’t have many options.
There’s only about 25 million North Koreans, but yeah a huge refugee exodus would definitely be a problem for China.
Well, maybe they will have a lot of babies! I just pulled the number out of my butt (I thought of saying “a lot of” instead). :)
ShivaX
1589
China could take care of NK if they really wanted to, but it’s easier to just do nothing.
So, this is still escalating, it seems. A former pro Russian politician and a pro Russian journalist were both killed in Kiev by gunmen…
There have been a string of suspicious deaths over the past few months. It appears to be score settling between the the new government and the old.
I expect fighting will resume as the weather improves and the UA recovers from the wounds it suffered this winter.
The BBC has interviewed DNR commanders who have flat-out stated that Russian officers have been commanding operations for them, Russian troops have been fighting for them, and Russian equipment has been the backbone of their forces. It’s pretty clear to everyone that the Russians are in effect occupying eastern Ukraine. Given the realities on the ground and in Europe, though, if fighting does resume with its previous intensity, there’s little likelihood Kiev will be able to do much to stop the rebels from taking, well, whatever they want.
Bump for an amusing factoid. While channel surfing the other day, I came across a soccer match and was about to click away when I noticed they were playing the Ukrainian national anthem to honor their team. They ran an English translation of some of the lyrics across the bottom of the screen. The title of the anthem blew me away. Shche ne vmerla Ukraina means “Ukraine has not yet perished.” That has to be the least optimistic, most depressing anthem title of all time.
Yeah, ours at least is the usual bombastic stuff.
In other news, more fighting now, more rhetoric, and a relatively continuous flow of information, if you look for it, pretty much proving the Russians are in there up to their sable coats.
I don’t think the war will end until someone loses, and loses emphatically.
Which pretty much means Kiev losing (the Ukrainians, as people, already have lost, no matter which side of the political divide they are on, I’m afraid). I can’t see Moscow retreating on this, and I can’t see anyone stopping them.
That seems the most likely outcome to me as well, and my prognostication abilities in this thread to date have been excellent. I pointed out that the Donetsk region was a bigger prize than Crimea, that it had about the same preponderance of ethnic Russians, and that Putin would probably make a play for it before he actually did. The fact that he’s trying to throw the absolute minimum of force into the area to make it seem more an uprising than an invasion is the only reason the conflict isn’t over yet.
I suspect the Russians have a range of acceptable outcomes, a federalized (and united) Ukraine being one of them. Federalization would anchor Ukraine in Russia’s orbit and curtail any NATO expansion. That helps explain some of Russia’s restraint.
I don’t think the region is much of a prize though, it may be the heart of the Ukrainian economy but that says more about Ukraine’s poverty than the region’s wealth. Annexing the region would also create a hostile rump state on Russia’s border, a rump state shorn of its russophilic east.
