Simple Question of International Import

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

What are the odds that this gets a LOT worse by the traditional spring time offensive season when a young general's fancy turns to invasion?

Brief timeline:

North Korea is accused of torpedoing a South Korean warship.

South Korea fires at North Korean fishing boats crossing the maritime border North Korea refuses to recognize.

North Korea is revealed to have highly modern facilities for nuclear material enrichment.

Not to mention, North Korea is facing the challenge of passing along the regime to a third generation of the Kim family.

North Korea is known for rattling its sabre and demanding to have attention paid to it when it is being ignored, but this is looking like a very different than recent years -- South Korea really has to retaliate...and half of South Korea's population lives in the Seoul metropolitan area within artillery range of the DMZ.

So a question -- is North Korea suicidal or are they betting that this behavior can get them some more winter grain shipments?

Comments

[policraticus.livejournal.com]

Who said they were subhuman? If the NorKs plunge the peninsula into war and threaten even nuclear war, then China will squash them like a bug. That seems to me to be supremely human. What has been subhuman is allowing North Korea to totter along in its increasingly sclerotic lunacy as a full on totalitarian nightmare. That inhumanity can be shared out among the major powers to various degrees.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The problem is that North Korea holds Seoul hostage, and any war will see Seoul, where the great majority of South Koreans live, wiped out by sheer Dakka even though the Dakka's very, very old, 50 years of accumulating it is too much for the USA and ROK to negate. Faced with the abyss of an economic catastrophe on the grand or the small powers, as you said the tendency to immorality took over among the major powers.

[policraticus.livejournal.com]

As with most huge, monstrous and deadly international conundrums, dodging the tough issues just make things worse.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

And as with most societies around the world, the PRC's leaders prefer to ignore them until the point of no return is reached. And any attempt to actually integrate North Korea into South Korea would be a lot more painful than integrating East Germany into West Germany was.

[policraticus.livejournal.com]

At this point the PRC and the ROK have to weigh the pain of integrating DPRK on their terms versus allowing the DPRK to integrate itself on its own chaotic terms.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

They've needed to do that well before this point, IMHO.

[squidb0i.livejournal.com]

+1

[ninboydean.livejournal.com]

I don't really disagree with your expanded analysis here. What I take issue with is your characterization of China as "unique" from the US in disinterest in civilian life, and extending that to policy production.

For one thing, you assume a democratic model in both nations (or at least in the US, with your "uninterested" subject in China being the leaders who "wont be hand wringing"). But I don't think that liberal hand-wringing has done shit in the US. And the recent history of the US and its campaigns prove that bombing civilians and supporting Genocide are valid options.

I think you're right that the US has no political capital to be the invader in N. Korea. But this has very little to do with any difference in the relative treatment of human dignity, and everything to do with the particular characteristics of the region, its history, and the history of the US in the region.