I don’t know if folks in D.C. read Blue Mass Group. I hope some do.
Lot of news about North Korea lately. They now have a long range missile and maybe a nuke. If their leader is smart, he won’t give it up. Look what happened to Colonel Gaddafi when he gave his up. Nope, not going to happen. Kim Jong-un is no fool. Speaking of fools, our local fool on Pennsylvania Avenue (or is he golfing today?) wants to rattle his saber. Good luck with that. Kim Jong-un has South Korea as his human shield.
I have a better idea. Send container ships to North Korea. Send hundreds of them, thousands of them. Fill them with IPhones and clothes from The Gap. Load them up with Big Macs and Hot Pockets and the latest issue of People Magazine. Have them bursting at the seams with flat screen TV sets, Nike trainers, FitBits and NFL memorabilia. In other words, load them up with so much Western crap that they too will get hooked on this lifestyle and say to hell with Kim Jong-un and all the rest. They’ll rise up and kick his ass out, pronto.
How much will all this cost? Plenty, but a hell of a lot less than cruise missiles and worse.
And it WILL work. You know it will.
As good as any other idea I’ve heard.
I once heard someone say that the Iron Curtain was demolished by fries and a Coke!
American consumer culture and entertainment is the Pax Americana. :\
When the reality sets in that two crazy megalomaniacs have their fingers on the nuclear button, we won’t be laughing when the bombs start falling on our sorry asses.
My fear is that Donald Trump will order a “preemptive” nuclear attack on North Korea that will be followed by massive nuclear response against the US by China.
It is exactly the kind of thing this insane bully in the White House would do, and I have ZERO confidence that calmer heads around him will prevail.
Mr. Trump MUST BE removed from office NOW — because he is a clear and present danger to all of humanity.
I doubt China will attack it’s biggest customer. We’re too closely linked. But yeah, Trump is a mess and so is the Republican Party, the only party that can remove him from office. So there’s that……
Of course if DPRK does strike first we will have to hit back. I don’t want it to come to that for all the obvious reasons, but I also don’t want to give the American people the slightest excuse to rally behind THIS President.
Johns idea is actually quite good if executed seriously. One of the best ways to defeat this regime is to open it up to trade and contact with the South and the US. That strategy in the 90’s actually weakened it and led to a period where a lot of news came out from the country showing just how unstable the regime was.
John also shows the biggest folly in removing Qadaffi or Saddam from power. Both were horrible dictators, but they both voluntarily agreed to inspection and disarmament. In the case of Qadaffi there was even a formal denouncement of past terrorism and victim compensation. Both were rewarded for their cooperation with American backed regime change. Hence why Assad immediately wedded himself to a nuclear power and why he has only given up his chemical weapons when directly forced to by that same ally.
Iran had no active nuclear program prior to the Iraq War. North Korea resumed theirs after the Axis of Evil speech. These are rational responses by rational actors to perceived threats. Our response should be equally cold hearted and rational.
These weapons pose no real threat to the US or it’s interests. They will say Kim is crazy and irrational, but he knows nuclear weapons is his best insurance policy against regime change from the West or an internal coup backed by the Chinese who would be happy to trade away these unreliable pariah Kim family for a more pliable puppet.
The irrational move would be using them against the US or its allies or giving them up without major concessions on sanctions we are unwilling to give. Our leverage was shot after 9/11 overreach. It’s likely he will have many nuclear weapons that can reach American shores. So does Vladimir Putin, the Chinese and Pakistan. All arguably just as hostile to the US. Pakistan’s stockpile is arguably even more unstable and likely to end up in terrorists hands.
So our best bet is to continue to push crippling sanctions while getting the South and Japan to increase their defense budgets to shoulder more of the burden. The Chinese will fear THAAD deployments in the South (a fantastic system btw-way better than Patriot) and an independent deterrent capability from Japan. Those two former adversaries cooperating will also be anathema to China. This will put the pressure on Xi to cut the chord. McMaster, Mattis, and Tillerson are clearly committed to this plan. Likely the one President Clinton would’ve pursued. The only irrational nuclear actor in this equation is their boss….
That’s a nice fantasy. We can call it ‘Operation Trolling Thunder.’…
What happens when the North Korean dictator nukes this fleet of container ships and sends them to the bottom of the Pacific?
Suppose, for the sake of the argument we are able to get iPhones and flat screen TVs to North Korea…, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a picture of the peninsula at night, but most of N. Korea is completely dark… they are barely wired for basic electricity so congratulations, you’ve shipped them a varied collection of paperweights.
Oh, and Beijing and Shanghai have iPhones and Big Macs already…. how’s that working out as a precursor to righteous upheaval?
I don’t see why saturating them with consumerism, essentially the capitalist version of carpet bombing, is likely to play out the way you think it will. But it is a peculiarly American form of optimism to believe we can will a particular outcome simply with more… more.
Okay, so just sent Gap fashions, generators, petrol, refrigerators, Big Mac….some of it has to get through and when the people see that their government is blowing up this stuff, they will, as I said earlier, get pissed and throw the bums out.