Sometimes we just need to back away and think for ourselves a moment, filter out the hue and cry. South Korea has the 11th strongest economy in the world. It has an arms industry of its own, exporting weaponry to lots of other countries. And the Republic of Korea [ROK], South Korea, has the 11th strongest military in the world. Far, far ahead of North Korea.
So what the hell is the US doing with its 25,000 troops in South Korea? ROK is perfectly able to defend itself, economically, militarily, diplomatically, every way. If they don’t feel strong enough to do it, they could form a mutual defense treaty with Japan, with whom they share the North Korean threat.
Ohh. Yeah. North Korea has nukes. Whoopteedoo.
Does anyone really suppose South Korea, Japan, hasn’t the capability of blowing those North Korean missiles and aircraft being launched a few hundred miles from them, doesn’t have, I was going to say the capability of knocking them out of the sky before they emerge outside North Korean boundaries?
Once we drop away from the WWIII rhetoric, the cries of nuclear winter and running around in increasingly smaller circles shouting increasingly shrill pronouncements, isn’t the greatest likelihood that, should North Korea attack anyone, it would be South Korea, or possibly Japan?
Because North Korea isn’t so crazy as to have attacked anyone at all in force since 1954. That’s right. There’s not a combat veteran, not one, in the North Korean military.
And where the hell do they get all that war material? Every round for those tanks is expensive, every rocket, every missile, every helicopter, every airplane, every bomb. North Korea is a poor country. Who the hell does anyone suppose is going to lend them money for leading edge weaponry, or send them 21st Century tanks, helicopters, airplanes?
I recall back before Nixon went to China there used to be frequent papers and articles with titles such as, Is China a Sleeping Giant, or a Paper Tiger?’. They were mainly concerned in those days about the Chinese military.
There’s probably a reason that today nobody asks the same question about North Korea. They’re too handy for waving around as s boogerman hiding in the dark closet or under the bed when Iran or some other scary place wears itself out as a war mongering distraction.
But sometimes we just need to stop and think.
Old Jules
So Far From Heaven 
If N. Korea starts things up, odds are China will back them as before. That is far too many people for S. Korea to deal with – as we found out when the U.N. went in there back in 1950.
Mao Tse Tung and Josephus Stalin are dead. May they rest in peace. When China flooded troops into Korea they were an isolated country and didn’t depend on selling toasters, rubber monster toys, steel, machine tools and other consumer products to the US and Europe to keep the population busy and happy. Communism is a different breed of duck than it was in the 1950s and every place but North Korea is a different place.
But all that aside, whatever the truth is about China, there’s a greater question: Why does it fall on the US to protect South Korea? South Korea doesn’t stand between us and any booger bears. Nobody’s going to rage through South Korea on their way to Alaska or Hawaii.
The country is protective that way. Why else do we allow so many illegals to live here, start gangs, etc. Where I used to work, illegals picked up for a crime were deported – 6 months later they were back and pulling the same crime, but their ID had a different name.
Prosecute anyone who hires, sells a car, rents a shelter, sells beer or cigarettes to an illegal alien and there won’t be any. The solution has always been there. No need for walls. Except what’s wanted is theater and showmanship, not getting rid of illegals and stopping the flow.
I’ve known and worked with a lot of illegals during my life…. they were almost all good workers and they weren’t doing crimes except smoking some jade, maybe DWI sometimes. There’s a huge amount of BS rhetoric out there in the narratives about illegals.
I was also had my car hit by one and since they had no insurance …. There is always another side to the story.
There’s not another side to the story of how to keep them out …… put the people who hire them, rent to them, in jail. Only one side to that story.
Another question…why does it seem to fall on the U.S. to protect anyone?
That’s a question needs shouting from rooftops.
Seoul is 35 miles from the DMZ, the NK has a 6.4 million man military & the south has 495,000.
As a side note I’ll bet there are some South Koreans alive today who remember life when the Japanese controlled Korea & their memories are not pleasant.
I can see why we’re still in SK but I often wonder why we are still in Afghanistan…
I suppose it depends on which numbers you choose to believe. South Korea Active Military: 655000. North Korean active military: 1190000. https://www.theguardian.com/world/datablog/2013/apr/08/south-korea-v-north-korea-compared …. what a blessing it is that you can kill off so many people with modern weaponry so’s it just doesn’t matter how many men you have if the other side has the proper weaponry to demolish them all. As for remembering Japan, there are still a good many alive in the US who don’t care much for the country, either.
North Korea will not submit to the US short leash! This is the type of defiance that the deep state neocons will never accept!
I wonder if anyone has any way of knowing who will submit to what in the real world. We humans tend to do whatever we think we can get away with, whether we’re Koreans, Americans or Japanese. Sometimes we get away with it [the way Israel’s doing, for instance] and sometimes we don’t get away with it, as demonstrated by WWI, WWII, the Korean War, Vietnam, and countless other events in human history. We’re lousy at predicting what other people will do under a given set of circumstances. The French revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the collapse of the USSR all come to mind as an illustration.
I see the issue of what Korea will or won’t do as a matter that rightfully belongs to the North and South Koreans. The US presence in Korea at the end of WWII was a consequence of Korea’s participation in WWII under the heel of the Japanese, as it was for any other reason. Then, the fear of takeover by Communists and an oversight by Truman’s administration [failed to put Korea on the list of places we’d go to war to protect] brought the war and our involvement. Of course MacArthur’s pronouncement, “Korea is a dagger pointed at the heart of Japan” probably had some influence, too.
But when Communism went away as a worldwide takeover threat even the tenuous justification of that, which led so many to untimely death during the 20th Century, went away.
I’m not saying using them to scare the US population has had no consequences manifested in the behavior of North Korea. It probably has.
I don’t believe the US was ever all about the enlightened rhetoric of the constitution. It definitely uses the language when it suits them, suggesting moral high ground. The authority of the US is in its branding, what people think it’s about!
The reality is much different and other descriptions are revealed to be much more reliable(true).
I’m including a link to a post of mine I did a while ago. Hope you don’t mind and will take a look at it…it’s pretty short! 😎
https://sevenspheres.org/2017/12/21/how-the-world-really-works/
The main problem is that no one takes time to stop and think, they just react. Sounds more like animals than humans…
The masses are manipulated and titillated by fear mongering rhetoric, nothing like a good old fashioned threat to fuel the flames.
I’ve been honored to work beside “illegal” people who had a great work ethic and a surplus of generosity, always cooking, inviting and sharing, which is not as common as one would hope in the “legal” community.
Yep, legal gets really important when someone you don’t like isn’t. Otherwise it mostly doesn’t count for much. Gracias,Old Jules
Yes, anyone who thinks doesn’t swallow simple rhetoric. There’s more going on here that has the potential to damage our fragile Democracy than meets the eye.
Likely we’ll understand what’s going on after it already happened. That’s one of the best things about life…. we can see afterward why burglars shouldn’t break into the Watergate, why the Japanese shouldn’t attack Pearl Harbor, why the Germans shouldn’t invade Poland, and why the French aristocracy and the Russian aristocracies ought to treat their citizenry with a tad more respect. But right now Washington DC is telling one another, “Let them eat cake!” Old Jules
I’m reading Daniel Ellsberg’s book, The Doomsday Machine. VERY scary. He makes some good points in there (I’m only on ch 3 and already feeling terrified) about how very clever people got conned into believing all the stuff about how much better armed than the USA – the USSR was and worked to make matters far worse. I have a feeling in the next few chapters it’s only going to get worse. Hey, who needs to learn from history?
Hi there. Thanks for coming by. Seems to me if humans needed to learn from history we’d have died off a long time ago. We tend to behave about the same whether we learn history or not and there’s no evidence it’s ever been any different. But the phrase, “We must learn from history or be doomed to repeat it,” [no idea who said it] sounds great. It just doesn’t carry anything into reality where humans are concerned. Gracias, Old Jules
Yep, we have survived thus far. But our capacity for committing mass suicide has become somewhat greater the last few decades! Maybe we just shouldn’t survive as a species… but looks like we’ll take lots of others with us when we go.
Earth’s a tough old mud ball. All those fossils out there tell us species come, proliferate, and go away without much lasting impact on a geological scale. Giant lizards, mastodons, and dodo birds might be nice to all share the planet together. It’s a big place. But when we go and whatever we take with us, a few thousand years, a million, and whatever’s around then will have to look hard to find a trace we were ever here. And without us and our timepieces that million years will go like lightning. “My,” this old planet will mutter, “Time surely flies!”
Time is overrated!
Overrating is the human condition. Time isn’t even sure what it is and it can’t make up its mind whether its important, or not in the overall scheme of things. Gracias, Old Jules