Trump Uses Business Acumen to Contain North Korea

[ckinv368]

North Korea, the troglodyte equivalent of a nation state run by a 33 year-old dictator with a penchant for bad haircuts and worse suits, has been an international pariah for decades.  Since the fall of the Soviet Bloc in 1991, and a devastating famine between 1995 and 1998, its actions have become more desperate and dangerous.  In a never-ending quest for food and fuel aid, it has acted the part of a petulant child, committing increasingly-hostile military provocations which only temporarily diminish when someone provides a handout.

The US has tried time-and-again to negotiate with North Korea, to no avail.  In 1994, former President Jimmy Carter believed he set Kim Il-sung straight.  Secretary of State Madeleine Albright drank wine and held talks with Kim Jong Il in 2000.  She posed for photos, paid her respects at the tomb of Kim Il-sung, visited schools, and declared of her trip that “I danced with the children and I’m very satisfied.”  The trip produced no lasting results, other than giving North Korea a propaganda victory.  There have been two-party talks, six-party talks, and five-party talks that resulted from North Korea walking out of the six-party talks.  Jimmy Carter traveled back to the country to offer his respect to the “Supreme Leader,” Bill Clinton participated in lengthy dinners and photo ops, and Dennis Rodman offered to teach Kim Jong-un how to rebound in an episode of ill-planned basketball diplomacy.  All of these efforts have been fruitless.  Through it all, North Korea continued developing nuclear weaponry, while the US allowed it to repatriate tens of millions of dollars in foreign currency reserves. 

To date, US containment efforts have been limited to diplomacy.  With an estimated 1.2 million landmines littering the demilitarized zone, and 13,000 North Korean artillery pieces, hundreds of 240mm rockets and roughly 300 ballistic missiles pointed directly at Seoul—a mere 35 miles from the DMZ—a military option is not particularly feasible. 

This ongoing threat to Seoul has provided North Korea an international hall-pass, allowing it to flex its military might with seeming impunity.  When a North Korean submarine sank a South Korean warship in 2010, killing 46 sailors, South Korea refused to respond militarily.  North Korean missile and nuclear testing has continued unabated as well.  It conducted five nuclear tests in the last ten years, and twenty-six missile tests . . .

Read more at:

https://www.cameronkinvig.com/single-post/2017/04/18/Trump-Uses-Business-Acumen-to-Contain-North-Korea

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[geronl]

I'm not clicking the link, the headline alone tells me it's a BS snowjob.

[TomSea]

We are lucky to have a President like Trump; standing up for America during this crisis. Of course, he's letting our military largely run this.

[EasyAce]

I wonder how long before those not marching in perfect synchronised lockstep behind the little bastard will
be disappeared . . .

[EasyAce]

From Ya Got Took:

No fighting China on currency, no wall, no NATO reform. Add a few more items to the list: Janet Yellen was definitely
out before she wasn’t; our relationship with Russia was “great” during the campaign but today is a “horrible relationship”
that is “at an all-time low” (he may not know about the Cuban missile crisis); the president could not make war on Syria
without congressional approval (“big mistake if he does not!”) until he could. The Affordable Care Act remains the law of the
land. Steve Bannon of Goldman Sachs, Gary Cohn of Goldman Sachs, Steven Mnuchin of Goldman Sachs, and Dina Powell
of Goldman Sachs are firmly ensconced in their various roles throughout the Trump administration. The alt-right basement-
dwellers and sundry knuckleheads beamed that Trump was going to be a “nationalist,” and that he would give the boot to
coastal elitists, moderates, and Ivy League snoots.

In reality, Trump is a New York Democrat who is being advised by other New York Democrats — Ivanka Trump and Jared
Kushner prominent among them — who are more or less the sort of people who brought you the Obama and Clinton
administrations: business-friendly corporate Democrats, people who think of themselves as post-ideological pragmatists,
consensus progressives who are much more interested in opening up backdoor channels to Planned Parenthood than they
are in the priorities of people they consider nothing more than a bunch of snake-handling rustics and talk-radio listeners
stockpiling gold coins and freeze-dried ice cream in their basements. Trump was a Clinton donor and a Chuck Schumer
donor, and he is acting like one.   

Surprise.

From Is America Really Ready for a Second Korean War?

The terrible aspect is easy to see: North Korea is a place of tyrannical horror, ruled by a backward regime that
oppresses its own people on a scale seen nowhere else in the world. That regime sustains itself in part by maintaining
a permanent war footing, putting its immense but antiquated forces on hair-trigger alert and promising ultimate devastation
in the event of conflict. While we can bomb, say, an al-Qaeda gathering in Yemen without risking immediate catastrophe,
any assault on North Korea would represent a gigantic roll of the dice, with the fate of entire cities hanging in the balance.

And that brings us to the stability. As awful as the Kim dynasty has been, aside from the initial South Korean invasion, it
has not sought to become a regional hegemon like Iran. The Kims have not launched war after war, threatened a good
chunk of the world’s oil reserves, shot down American aircraft, or tried to kill American presidents as Saddam Hussein did.
They haven’t sought intercontinental domination like Hitler’s Germany or Tojo’s Japan. For three generations, it has served
their interests to keep North Korea on the edge of war but never truly at war. And for three generations, it has served
American and South Korean interests to respond in kind.

There may come a time when the terrible aspects of the North Korean regime become so pronounced that we choose to
risk that fragile stability. It may even be possible to mitigate those aspects — perhaps by shooting down North Korean
missiles or employing other targeted strikes — without actually inviting the cataclysm. But it’s vital that we conduct our
public debate with eyes wide open, fully aware of the immense risks present on the peninsula. For more than 60 years,
America has been strong, and South Korea exists and thrives today in large part because of that strength. Maintaining
the status quo isn’t weak, and it very well may be prudent.

To be clear, I’m not arguing that the horror of war should dictate that we maintain peace at all costs. The understandable
shock of World War I, after all, led the allies to appease Hitler until he was strong enough to trigger the worst war in
human history. But there is a substantial difference between appeasing an expansionist power and maintaining deterrence
and containment. North Korea is in a box of our own making. We should take great care before we break that box. Total
war is a terrible thing to risk.

From Trump’s Congratulatory Call to Erdogan Is Bad; His and NATO’s Lack of Urgency on Turkey’s Authoritarianism Is Even Worse

President Trump called Turkey President Recep Erdogan to congratulate him and his ruling party on a narrow win
for a constitutional referendum that will change the country's system of government from a parliamentary to a presidential
one in a way that will also leave the presidency with fewer checks and balances—reinforcing Trump's preference for an
authoritarian style of government while also illustrating why he was correct not to treat NATO as a sacred cow during the
2016 election, even though he's come to do so as president . . .

Turkey's transformation into an authoritarian government did not start with the results of Sunday's election, which was
highly criticized by election monitors on the ground. The Turkish government's crackdown on a free press had been
ongoing for years, and accelerated last summer after a failed coup attempt. During the referendum campaign, Erdogan
likened his European NATO allies to Nazis for not permitting his government to electioneer in favor of the referendum
in their countries.

More worryingly, Turkey has been repeatedly accused of providing support for ISIS and other extremist groups in Syria,
especially those fighting the Kurds, with whom the U.S. and other NATO members involved in the war on ISIS have allied.
Earlier this year, Turkey lobbied the U.S. unsuccessfully to drop Kurdish forces from the forces organized to take Raqqa
from ISIS . . .

Trump's appropriation of non-interventionist stances on issues like NATO, U.S. alliances with authoritarian regimes like
Saudi Arabia, and military interventions in places like Libya and Iraq was unconvincing, in part because of the general
fluidity of every other political position he took, in part because of his consistent admiration for authoritarian leaders,
and in large part because of his expressed, genuine-seeming desire to "blow the shit up out of ISIS."

In this context, Trump's heel-turn on NATO shouldn't be surprising. It's a lot easier to escalate the U.S. wars he inherited,
and start his own, without also trying to challenge the international status quo.

But recent developments in Turkey show why just such a challenge is important. U.S. foreign policy is guided by decisions
made after World War 2 and during the Cold War, of which Turkey's membership is a relic. During the presidential
campaign, Trump promised serious reflection on the U.S.'s role in the world. His promise was false, but that reflection
continues to become more necessary by the day.