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82 years, give and take a day
82 years, give and take a day
#1
http://www.independent.ie/world-news/no ... ign=buffer

Looks like some errors are doomed to be repeated in the near future.

At least if Trump gets his way.

He has, quite literally, no concept of 'soft' power. It's almost funny.


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Re: 82 years, give and take a day
#2
Darts, you invoke Goddard's Law in the first post but do not remember the corollary of Chamberlain's folly. Never forget that for all his problems, Churchill was right, "You cannot negotiate with a tiger with your head in its mouth." 
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Re: 82 years, give and take a day
#3
Rajvik Wrote:Darts, you invoke Goddard's Law in the first post but do not remember the corollary of Chamberlain's folly. Never forget that for all his problems, Churchill was right, "You cannot negotiate with a tiger with your head in its mouth."

The art of foreign policy, as someone once said, is to "Speak softly and carry a big stick"

And you do a disservice to Chamberlain that I will not discuss here. Chamberlain was, after all, the man who declared war on Hitler. Not Churchill. Churchill was an arrogant blowhard.________________________________
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Re: 82 years, give and take a day
#4
Jesus, he talks like a budget supervillain.

As for the Chamberlain bit, I always remember that his famous 'peace in our time' line had the unspoken addition of 'until we're ready to punch the asshole.'
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Re: 82 years, give and take a day
#5
Regardless of who said what, who was a pompous blowhard, etc., etc., let me put this out there: China will pretty much just stand aside.

Really.  With all the they have invested in America, it would be economic suicide for them to try anything.  Oh, there'll be rhetoric for sure.  Maybe even sanctions.  Which would be rather... interesting if that happens.

The short version is that China is about as sick of North Korea's shit as we are.  They're disruptive, and if there's one thing neat and orderly People's Republic of China fucking despises, it's disruptions.  (This is why they fucking loved Obama - he was moderate and predictable.)

Now, if the USA were to invade the DPRK, well...  It would largely be ignored, I think, aside from the usual political harumphing.  Internally, the PRC will be screaming because they're losing the ONLY communist ally they have. But outwardly they'll be stuck and utterly dreading the idea of how many refuges are gonna be swarming over their border.

And then there's the issue of the 'brainwashing' the general populace has undergone.  An insurgency is not only highly likely, but really all-but assured.

This means that if we do this, we need to do it right.  Not like how we botched Afghanistan and Iraq.

That will mean treating prisoners and the dead with the utmost respect.
Going to local leaders for guidance.
Sourcing food and goods for relief efforts locally where possible.
And generally try to remain as impassive as possible, because these people have been taught from birth that we are the scum of the universe and that we can't really expect the initially warm welcome we got in Baghdad.

This is also probably going to mean getting the PRC involved in the mop-up/occupation.  But the only way I see that happening is by allowing them to have oversight in the organization of the new government.  Which, honestly, I don't really care myself.  Those poor people have lived in hell for so long that anything the Chinese set up for them would be a godsend.

I have my doubts as to whether a Trump-led invasion of the DPRK would go well or not.  But it's my hope that with "Mad Dog" Maddox at the helm certain mistakes will not be repeated.
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Re: 82 years, give and take a day
#6
You're missing an important nuance.

Carry a big stick and you may speak softly.
But start waggling around, and people very quickly expect you to use it.

There's the Nixonian madman theory at play, maybe. 

Truman made a similar threat - but only after using nuclear weapons. Trump, whoever - hasn't. He's shouting loudly and waggling his stick and drawing attention to it.

And in the process - Trump has basically left himself two options.

Back down publically. Or start a War.

It's Chekov's nuclear arsenal. Either you back your threats up, or look like an eejit and never get taken seriously again. So, he has basically painted himself into this massive bloody corner. Most his soft-power options are gone - not that he has any idea how to use them. All that's left is waggling the stick and hoping nobody pushes it to the point where you have to hit them.

Either you do, and horrify the world.
Or don't, and look impotent.

He's just relying on the graces of China being interested enough in not dealing with the fallout of a nuclear war to maybe reign little Kim in and fix his fuckups for him. Which  becomes a problem, if China is betting on making Trump loose face by backing down - which might help it expand in the south china sea.

Which also means they're risking a nuclear war too. But not a *big* one. And it's the sort of nuclear war that would definitely go a lot better for China than America.

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Re: 82 years, give and take a day
#7
I KNEW IT!!!

http://www.dailywire.com/news/19624/chi ... on-bandler

<span data-s9e-mediaembed="youtube" style="display:inline-block;width:100%;max-width:640px"><span style="display:block;overflow:hidden;position:relative;padding-bottom:56.25%"><iframe allowfullscreen="" scrolling="no" src="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsqmU3v0hVA" style="background:url(http://i.ytimg.com/vi/HsqmU3v0hVA/hqdefault.jpg) 50% 50% / cover;border:0;height:100%;left:0;position:absolute;width:100%"></iframe></span></span>
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Re: 82 years, give and take a day
#8
One might argue that Trump forced china to solve the problem.

One wonders if that's actually true. Either way, it's still a failure. He's managed to make America look bad in the process - and hemmed himself in on policy. He has no other option left but to push towards war. It's just not done - you rememebert the shitstorm Reagan created with 'The Bombing Begins in Five Minutes', and now we've Trump actively agitating for nuclear weapons use.

Even when, arguably, the United States has plenty of military options that don't rely one iota on a nuclear warhead.

Of course, it's very easy to agitate against a country that really, posses no actual threat to you. Try to imagine the same rhetoric being used against the Soviet Union - and how alarming that would be.

The Kim regime can just ignore him if it wants. It achieves its goal just by existing. And it's achieving that by making the world acknowledge that, if you fuck with us, we can give you a really bloody nose in the process. At least, they have the potential to. That's all North Korea wants to demonstrate - it knows it'll loose any war it fights, but wants to demonstrate just how pyhrric a victory that'll be.

Either in public relations, on humanitarian front or in sheer blood spent. It won't be a short victorious war for anyone.

It doesn't even have to use a nuclear weapon to achieve it.  The problem with North Korea using its nuclear weapons is that, once they're gone, they're gone. They're probably never going to be used. They're a massive white elephant that has to be acknowledged by everyone as a possibility of being unleashed, while at the same time probably never going to be unleashed.

Because the moment one of them leaves the silo is the moment the Kim regime ends. Nobody's going to be held back by the worry about them using them anymore, and everyone is going to be fairly pissed off at them for using them. The United States could probably happily annihilate a large chunk of North Korea without ever using a nuclear weapon. The average B2 can carry 30-40 tons of conventional bombs.... The equivelant of 6 or 7 Lancaster bombers used to incinerate Dresden. But risks pushing the DPRK to the point where it thinks it might have no choice but to try one small bomb, to demonstrate its resolve or something.....

Which means the whole lot gets in this weird sort of stalemate where nobody rational particularly wants to risk things escalating to the point where it pushed the DPRK to the point where it thinks it has no choice but to use them - (In case they're made to go away by surprise or whatever), and at the same time, the DPRK probably doesn't want to get into that situation either, because if it has to use them it then looses the protection they provide.

Nuclear weapons lead to some really fucked up conclusions at times.

And Trump is merrily throwing these out the window.________________________________
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Re: 82 years, give and take a day
#9
Dartz Wrote:One might argue that Trump forced china to solve the problem.
...

One might, but from where I sit it looks like China washed its hands of the entire mess and punted the ball back to the USA.

If there is a war, I would not be at all surprised if at the end of it China tells the USA "you made this mess, you clean it up, we aren't providing any humanitarian relief, we're busy building a wall along our border". Then the USA has to decide between spending even more money, or pissing off Seoul while letting thousands of Koreans die from starvation. (This possibility assumes a non-nuclear confrontation, of course. If even one nuke is dropped, all bets are off.)

EDIT:
There are two recent CBC News analyses that may be of interest here: --
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
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Re: 82 years, give and take a day
#10
What I'm hoping for is that General Maddox will preclude the use of nukes, opting instead to rely on the BMD capabilities of the 7th Fleet - by now, just about every ship over there with VLS is a BMD ship.

And also that Maddox is planning for the long-haul - a long-term occupation that will permit the South Koreans to slowly reintegrate their Northern counterparts into their society.

Of course, if Trump winds up getting impeached before he can do anything untoward, that'd be nice, too.
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