Shall We Fight Them All?

Again, we find out that everything wrong in the world is America’s fault and the world will be much better off without us.

When America is gone, mankind can return to the perfect life of again living in the Garden of Eden.

It is totally unacceptable that North Korea has a nuclear arsenal.

If this regime can get away with it then the whole idea of limiting nuclear weapons goes out the window. This is not about whether the US has an interventionist or isolationist foreign policy , the antique views of Pat Buchanan notwithstanding. This is about keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of unstable dictators and regimes. Lose this battle and nuclear proliferation is a given and nuclear war inevitable.

Taiwan, South Korea, Japan might be first to go ‘nuclear’ if Kim Jong Un develops the capacity to launch nuclear tipped ICBMs. The US nuclear ‘umbrella’ will be worthless to them. The Philippines and Vietnam will have the same problem.

North Korea’s nuclear arsenal will achieve what China’s could not. Push the US out of the Western Pacific. That is why China is not doing anything about it. Kim Jong Un’s recklessness serves their purposes.

It is totally unacceptable that North Korea has a nuclear arsenal.

Unacceptable by what standards, rules, or laws?

The DPRK’s reasons for building nuclear weapons are various. They wanted a bargaining chip as they knew post-Cold War that without the USSR providing aid, they were going to fall farther and farther behind an ever-wealthier South Korea, and they also wanted assurances from the U.S. that Washington wouldn’t attack. This last point was supposedly accomplished with the 1994 Agreed Framework, but Republican reluctance in Congress to provide the oil supplies and light-water reactors to North Korea as per the Framework, plus the North’s development of a uranium enriched program, led to the breakdown of the Agreement by 2003.

George W. Bush’s arrival in the White House witnessed a reversal from Bill Clinton’s policy of engagement (Bill once personally hosted a DPRK army marshal in 2000 in the White House). There were speculations of a Clinton-Kim Jong Il summit, as Madeline Albright had visited Kim in Pyongyang.

(Not that this means Clinton did everything right, but historical context is necessary).

By the time the Agreed Framework was dead, Saddam Hussein had been toppled, and Ariel Sharon was demanding Bush take out Syria. There were voices calling for Iran as well. Kim did not ignore this – with the “Axis of Evil” speech fresh in memory, North Korea’s leaders knew that there were possibly next. They stepped up their efforts to go nuclear, and this they did in 2005, as nightly news showed report after report after report of IEDs going off in Iraq. “Mission Accomplished” much?

Kim’s reasoning that nuclear weapons would provide a real defense against a U.S. invasion were well-founded. Moammar Qaddafi agreed to give up Libya’s nuclear program, and a few years later, the very same Obama administration officials (read: Hillary Rodham, wife of Bill) who praised him as an ally and partner later cackled on TV about his demise (Qaddafi was caught by rebel fighters who beat him, sodomized him with a sharp, pointy object, and then killed him after torturing him). It is only because Vladimir Putin, ah that “Hitler” (again, courtesy of Hillary Rodham, wife of Bill), that Syria hasn’t been overrun by monotheistic Middle Easterners who decapitate children and Catholic priests, rape women and sell them in public auctions, throw homosexuals from buildings, deface centuries-old art, and are establishing Sharia law to an extent that would make Al-Qaeda blush. Without Vladdy Daddy, would have Basher Al-Assad benefited from having nukes?

Today, North Korea is more confident than ever regarding nukes. Its technology is certainly primitive, but it has held off the U.S. It made George W. Bush de-list the DPRK from the State Department’s list of terror-sponsoring countries, and when Barack Obama took office, it had more nukes than when Obama arrived. Obama’s record is mixed, with limited success in passing and implementing sanctions. But sanctions would need years to work to yield effect, and 12 years after North Korea first declared itself a nuclear weapons state, it has tested nukes several times. Its know-how has grown as time has become even scarcer.

Now, we who are in the U.S., we who are Americans in the west, look at North Korea strictly as a faraway problem that our bombers and missiles can solve. But what about our South Korean adn Japanese allies, all within range of North Korean missiles/artillery?

A proper understanding of the Korean Peninsula’s geopolitical circumstances – North vs. South – is sine qua non to grasp why North Korea insists on nukes.

North Korea’s leaders, while evil, are not ignorant. They are aware that South Korea has already “won” the Korean War if the Korean War is defined as a contest of legitimacy. Both Korean states declare ownership and sole political legitimacy over the entire peninsula and despite talks, agreements, family reunions, and even joint sports delegations, consider the other outlaw, renegade, and utterly irreconcilable rivals.

Activists along the Yalu and Tumen Rivers (usually South Koreans and Korean-Americans) report that North Korean people are consuming South Korean media and have been doing so for a few years now. USBs are distributed illegally and clandestinely; South Korean TV shows, news programs, documentaries, etc., have already made it clear to many within the DPRK that south of the DMZ is a Korea where food is shockingly plentiful and diverse; where even the average folks dress well; where all can earn enough to drive large cars; where nobody is stunted due to malnutrition; where people are not slaves of the Yankee imperialists.

With this in mind, Kim Jong Un has stepped up his regime’s equivalents of the Gestapo and of the Stasi. To be found with South Korean media is a serious crime. Kim knows that the South Korea of 2017 isn’t the dirt-poor, nearly-failed state with a GDP lower than that of certain African countries as was the case when his grandfather was in his early 50s.

As such, Kim wants to gradually, over many years, to exhaust South Korea into submission.

He wants to use occasional, even once-a-few-years skirmishes to intimidate the South; he wants to bribe them into submission, with external threats which are bolstered by internal assistance. What we in the U.S. (minus former U.S. GIs and diplomats who were there then) often overlook is that during the previous decade, under 2 leftist presidents, South Korea was bitterly and unabashedly anti-American, tearing U.S. flags in protests, demanding the expulsion of our troops, trying to take down a statue of General Douglas MacArthur, and even attacking our soldiers on the streets. North Korea saw all this and manipulated this frenzy in the name of “Korean nationalism.” Many analysts feared that by 2010, the U.S.-ROK alliance would have literally ended.

This could not have been possible without the active and deliberate work of Fifth Columnists who are known to be pro-DPRK spies, many of whom have illegally visited Pyongyang to receive orders. They are agitators who want to ideologically compromise South Korea, prying it away from its status as a U.S. ally into the arms of the DPRK. It is frightening that this nearly happened during Kim Jong Il’s time.

It is true that in 2017, the anti-American fever has largely subsided, a far cry from where it was 10 years ago. But it’s likewise realistic to predict that it could be rekindled.

North Korea will grow ever bolder and more daring, engaging South Korea in a cycle of threats and perhaps even shooting incidents, only to back down in calls for negotiations. South Korea is likely to then grant concessions, bit by bit. Calls for reconciliation over war will push the South Korean government to go along with agreements. It will be so subtle and slow that few South Koreans will notice – after all, aren’t written statements with promises to work together better than thousands of rockets flying and landing?

Let us not forget that even during the Cold War, the DPRK established its own unification policy: a confederation system (one country, two systems) – but in reality, the DPRK would never tolerate half of the peninsula operating under a separate government. It would outwardly accept Seoul’s “capitulation” in a so-called “peace process” which would invariably obligate America to withdraw its troops, as that surrender (which would only be known to be such by Pyongyang itself) would chip away at the civil liberties and constitutional freedoms of South Korea. Then, over years if not a decade or more, absorption into the Korean confederation template – which would then quickly see the “gradual” become “abrupt” and by then, any opposition by South Korean politicians or citizens would be too little, too late.

And within this context, North Korea would indeed have won the Korean War – in the only way that truly matters: geopolitical supremacy and hegemony.

This is the ultimate purpose of Kim Jong Un’s nuclear program. To frighten South Korea or to warn America is only part of the package. Seoul and Washington must double-down if they want to avoid in the 21st Century what we witnessed in Vietnam in 1976: unification under the communists.