Threat from the DPRK (North Korea)

[Kinser79]

(09-21-2017, 09:42 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(09-20-2017, 09:09 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: The problem Mr. Horn, is that Kim is rational.  There is no "western sense" to whether one is rational or not.  In fact I would say that all three have been particularly cold and calculating in their world wide actions.  Kim Jong-Il and Kim Jong-Un in particular.  Il-Sung mostly lived on foreign aid from the USSR and China.

I spent enough time in the far east to know that western philosophy and eastern philosophy are dramatically different.

That isn't what you said. You said that Kim was not acting rationally. Reason does not require philosophy be it eastern or western. I fail to see what you gain from this non sequitur.

 

Quote: The DPRK exists because the PRC entered the Korean War en masse.

Agreed. But why did the PRC enter the war in mass? There is one strain of thought that says that Mao was defending a fellow communist, but that is of course to misunderstand Mao. Mao's relationships with foreigners was frigid at the best of times, which is quite typical of the Chinese in general. Rather Mao viewed having a US ally on his boarder as an existential threat to China and the construction of socialism in China. In his mind it would be far better to have a revisionist with a kooky form of Marxism-Leninism on the other side of the Yalu.

 

Quote: We were tired and far away, so we left an armistice in place expecting it to resolve in time.  Time, in the eastern sense, is a much longer horizon than it is in the western sense.  So here we are.

Speaking from a philosophical standpoint I would agree. In general Americans, Brits and Western Europeans have a short time-reference. In general Westerners think of the next day, next quarter, year. The Chinese, Japanese and Koreans see the world in large civilizational archs and are willing to take decades of pain for centuries of prosperity.

Quote:In the meantime, the Kims decided that we were weak (their view of our decision to accept the armistice), and have tested our patience time and again.  What they fail to understand is a product of their philosophy: western patience is as short as our view of time.  If we actually decide that enough is enough, this will get very ugly very fast.

Kim Jong-Il probably did not act on the assumption that the US was weak. Rather he acted on the assumption that the PRC would likely back him up if he was attacked (which was true for him at the time). Rather, his desire to have nuclear weapons was to use as a means to prop up his his regime and to threat the world with whenever he needs rice and penicillin.

Kim Il-Sung was more interested in reunifying Korea but was kept in check by the USSR. The Cold War kept the peace because the USSR didn't want a nuclear war, much less for the Korean peninsula, which while important to Kim Il-Sung was relatively unimportant to Moscow.

As for Kim Jong-Un, I think he's attempting to play the same game that Kim Jong-Il did, however, unfortunately for him the US' patience is wearing thin.

I don't know how much this has to do with time preferences, but I would say that in the West the culture promotes people attempting to be nice (or at least diplomatic) until that has been utterly exhausted. When we Westerners stop being nice, then we're really not nice.

Quote:

Kinser Wrote:As for shelling Seoul, I say let him.  It means the ROK will have no choice but to fight, and eventually reunify the peninsula.  They don't have much interest in doing that right now because modernizing the North would be a huge drag on their economy much like Germany experienced in their reunification.

So you're cheering on the idea of a land war in Asia then?  Do you honestly feel this makes any sense at all?

Land wars happen all the time in Asia. What I want is the threat the DPRK represents, and presents the world with being neutralized. Now if that can be done with sanctions we should do that, if that can be done by taking out some weapons systems and leaving others alone we should do that, if it means liberating North Korea by brute force, well we should do that.

The issue is simple. Either the US allows other powers to openly and deliberately threat it and its allies or it does not.

Quote:

Kinser Wrote:Vietnam not so much.  Neither the south or the north were particularly developed at the time.

The Vietnam War was a meat grinder.  Spend some time watching Ken Burns series on the subject.

Vietnam was mostly pointless from the US perspective.

My point was that neither the North Vietnam, nor South Vietnam was particularly developed and as such their reunification did not present the unifying power with economic drag down in the act of unifying. Rather their problem was mostly related to essentially having a protracted war on their own soil. The war itself essentially started in 1940 and lasted to 1975. I would say that most of the 20th century represented for Vietnam a Mega-Crisis, just like from 1839-1949 China had a Mega-Crisis.

I don't need to watch a documentary from Ken Burns to understand these things, I merely need to look at the economic data. That is far more telling than a long winded documentary that takes hours to explain something that can be understood in 10 minutes. Having a core Boomer uncle who was a Vietnam vet though I do understand that Boomers in particular are obsessed with that conflict.