This would not have happened if we had a real President instead of Donald Trump.
Since North Korea can nuke us now, can we get a real President instead of Donald Trump?
There are plenty of reasons to hate Trump that are real, but suggesting that anyone could have stopped NK from this is silly IMO. Unless they were willing to go to war, nothing would have stopped this.
Yeah, the fact NK has nuclear weapons is a failure of Us Leaders going back to Clinton.
Trump just happens to be the worst one to have in charge at this critical point.
It’s only the west coast. Trump didn’t get many votes from over here so I am sure he’ll egg “the guy” on.
Not sure if blaming leadership is fair. What exactly could Clinton (or Bush, or Obama) have done differently? Strike their nuclear installations earlier?
Clinton admitted that one reason he held back from approving air strikes was that he had received “a sobering estimate of the staggering losses both sides would suffer if war broke out.”
I blame the American Captain Page of the General Sherman. Interesting Wikipedia article:
I don’t think they would have had the balls to flaunt an ICBM under Clinton. They know Trump is an imbicile, and weak, and he has zero support from the international community.
NK can do whatever they want and we can’t do shit about it unless we attack, because no one in the world will help Trump. NK knows this.
um, I think the post about Trump was a sarcastic joke…
Pretty sure that the answer is “they could have done countless things differently.”
This notion you have where it’s simply inevitable that North Korea gets nuclear weapons is exactly the problem.
Being paralyzed by consequences is what is leading us to the point where they have nuclear weapons capable of hitting the US.
That is the end state of your “plan”.
The real problem isn’t how we got here, but the fact we have a Great Leader who could be goaded into doing something stupid simply by saying that the previous president didn’t have the stones.
Worst answer ever, but not sure it’s worth engaging over. The US invaded Iraq to prevent a dictatorship from using its massive stockpile of ‘weapons of mass destruction’, how did that go?
It’s so terrifying to have to trust Trump and the White House’s pronouncements on Korea. If it’s not Mattis personally speaking off the cuff I wouldn’t believe them telling me the sky is blue, after their absurdly lie-hea vy history about even the most trivially incorrect claims. The very first White House pronouncement was entirely focused on the size of the inauguration and the electoral victory. Uh.
You think that North Korea would break down into sectarian violence?
Again, your assertion that there is some kind of magical force of destiny, and our actions thus far with North Korea somehow constitute the ultimate correct answer, is absurd.
We went through this earlier. You think that because we’d win, it’s worth it, even if tens of thousands die. Thankfully, the majority disagrees along with our leadership thus far. The rest of us sane people hope that Trump isn’t goaded into triggering a costly and unnecessary war.
So what exactly is your end game? How do you think this ends up?
North Korea, and to a much more limited extent Iran (Tehran is mostly rhetoric, though usually inflammatory rhetoric) pose difficult challenges. We co-existed with the ICBM-armed USSR for decades, but there was a general modus vivendi worked out based however awkwardly on MAD, which in turn rested on the pretty solid assumption that neither side really wanted to commit seppuku. Despite Reagan’s “I’ve signed legislation outlawing Russia,” and various Soviet generals’ bellicosity over the years of the Cold War, the biggest danger after 1962 at least was pretty much accident and miscalculation. Pyongyang is problematic because we can’t assume the same sort of common ground, really; their mindset is even more opaque to us than the Kremlin’s was, and far less rooted in things we are familiar with.
Hell, I spent tedious hours in grad school the first time through in classes about the Politburo, the Central Committee,. and all sorts of crap about how the Soviets ran their state. We studied those suckers six ways to Sunday, and even though Russia was definitely not just like us, there were plenty of areas where what was going on fit into pretty well understood categories. Russian was taught in school (my undergrad language, which got me my first job after my MA, eventually).
Compare this to how NK is handled. We know very little about it, comparatively. We don’t read Korean poets , novelists, or playwrights, we don’t listen to Korean music, we don’t read about the great leaders of Korean history. We don’t teach Korean in schools usually, and we don’t offer many courses of the structure of Pyongyang’s military and civil government. Part of this is practical, as for many years North Korea wasn’t particularly a threat other than in the immediate region, and we had bigger fish to fry.Part of this is cultural bias, as we tend to focus on Europe or the Middle East, and tend to downplay Asia outside of China. Whatever the reasons, though, we are much, much less prepared when it comes to analyzing, or prognosticating about, North Korea than we ever were about the USSR. Our intelligence assets are far fewer, the barriers to information acquisition are higher, and the ability to assess and process what info we do get is lower by far than it was with our ability vis a vis the USSR, even though are technical means are vastly superior to what they were when I was in that sort of loop eons ago.
tl;dr. it’s a damn scary situation because of the opacity of the glass through which we have to look, darkly. I’m firmly on the side of not precipitating something that would, undoubtedly in my mind, result in definite catastrophes for uncertain gains, but Timex has a point, too. The constant crisis on the peninsula hurts our diplomacy, or economic interests, and our military security in direct and indirect ways, one of which being the omnipresent risk of miscalculation or error in a crisis which could blow up in everyone’s faces. It prevents us from really engaging with the Chinese on a more productive basis, and it keeps Seoul hostage to an, at best, unpredictable North Korean regime. Nothing lasts forever, so it’s prudent to have contingency plans for a variety of ways the North Korean situation could change.
Most crucially, if Pyongyang does in fact have missiles that can hit the USA, and has nuclear devices that those missiles can deliver successfully, this is fundamentally different than the USSR having the same things back in the day. Conceptually, this capability, coupled with the rhetoric coming out of Pyongyang, in my opinion in fact creates a legitimate casus belli, That is NOT to say I think we should act on it, just that when a country repeatedly threatens to attack you, and then goes and gets the means to do so, you are conceptually at least justified in taking action against them.
The kicker is that the action has to be productive of some desirable result. It may well be, as it has been for a long time with North Korea, that the status quot, as odious as it is, is actually more desirable than any alternatives involving military action. Here Timex and I may well disagree; I think that in practical terms we have to take the risk of North Korea getting in the first actual attack, if there is to be one, and rely on intel and defensive systems to prevent or mitigate the damage. In theory, though, I do think the USA is fully justified in attacking North Korea to eliminate their nuclear and missile programs with which they publicly threaten us. In practice, however, I believe strongly we should not do so.
This is a million times more thought than Trump will put into this situation. Can you be the President please, TheWombat?
If two stupid people without drivers license meet at an intersection, there is a good chance that they will crash into each other… Trump and Kim are a match made in hell. If I would read a history book from the future, I would not be surprised to read about a US-North Korean “war” where Trump sent the nukes, and NK had nothing to answer it with… I feel depressed, true
It seems to me the Obama Administration was taking the approach TheWombat describes in practice. This stuff is never as simple as “bomb the hell out of them” which is what our current President seems to think is a legitimate course of action based on past statements. What concerns me most about the man in charge right now is he doesn’t think. He just wants everyone to do what he says and if they don’t he wants the easiest solution which is usually just to burn things down.
He just wants to be a demagogue figurehead. I’m fairly confident that making big decision like when to go to war is about as far as possible from his comfort zone of things he wants to do. That’s not to say it won’t happen, just that he’d wait until “trusted advisors” tell him that’s what to do and he feels the level of praise he’d receive for such an action is enough to lift a finger. Being directly responsible for the deaths of millions wouldn’t be good for ratings, after all.
Trump doesn’t want to make any decisions, like @Dan_Theman said . He wants China to clean up the mess so he can take credit for it. But that could change (see his China tweet this morning), then the situation becomes what @newbrof described.