North Korean missiles land in Japanese waters
japantimes.co.jp
japantimes.co.jp
The cycle would go on forever, as long as China would not ditch support for NK. And of course, China would never get rid of such a powerful way to annoy everyone else.
NK would never actually attack, as it would kill their bluff and give everyone a good reason to convince China to wipe them out.
So this would be yet another episode. It's not "Mutually Assured Destruction", but "Perpetually Assured Annoyance".
It's not just this. China doesn't want a unified, Western-friendly Korea directly on its border. They also don't want the mass refugees if NK fails.
Very questionable. If you read about the Rangoon bombing[0] the short of it is the Chinese passed on a note from the NKs to the Americans requesting trilateral talks, essentially vouching for them, just prior to the bombing. Apparently, Deng Xaiping said afterwards he'd never let 'that motherfucker' (Kim Jong Il) set foot on chinese soil as long as he lived, and apparently, KJI never did.
All of the pathways to a rational NK have outcomes that China would not like including both collapse of the North Korean state, hostility between China and NK or variations on unification between SK and NK. The only stable option is to work with NK too slowly migrate towards a modern Chinese communism approach over the span of decades through the use of aid money, advisors, economic exchange, and educational programs. This only risks periodic regression via purges within North Korea.
I find that relationship basically a parasite and host, and now they're likely going to win for election in next year.
The fact that their population suffers famine nearly every goddamn year is just unbelievably sad.
How those people put up with it, I don't understand. They really managed to create a feudal country in a modern world. Could others do the same if left unchecked?
People en masse are willfully gullible when it comes for propaganda. Just look at the vaccine mandates.
I myself is from USSR, and when i see photos from NK i see that my past, and i really don't know how they today (or we back then) could get out of that situation until the system crumbles on its own.
>Could others do the same if left unchecked?
Do you see any other way for Afghanistan for example?
I've mentioned this in another comment, but you're severely underestimating the real relationship between North Korea and China. For the government, maybe it is only a strategic relationship, but if you talk to anyone who grew up in China there is a real feeling of kinship with the people that live in NK.
For a long time there has been a lot of cultural exchange between the nations and many Chinese near the border are indistinguishable culturally from North Koreans.
An attack on North Korea, even if a justifiable retaliation, would feel like an attack on the Chinese people for a great many everyday people in China.
The closest analog to the US would be Canada. Most American's, especially in the North, feel that Canadians are very culturally similar. Many people in far Northern states have friends and family in Canada. Overall the bond is much closer than with Mexico, which has more culture, ethnic and linguistic differences.
Imagine if Canada were ruled by a despot, who then irrationally launched a nuclear strike on another country. Even if American's were to feel that that was wrong, we would also still likely strongly defend Canadian people from aggressive retaliation. And this analogy is far from perfect, the sense I've gotten in conversations with Chinese about North Korea is that they're much closer.
North Koreans don’t speak Mandarin, they would be loath to consider themselves as Han, they have a totally unique food culture, etc.
I honestly think it’s closer to US / Taiwan style connection than what you claim.
To go even further on the Han point: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Commanderies_of_Han#His...
https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/09/03/china-redoubling-crackdo...
I've seen this mentioned in a documentary about people fleeing North Korea via China and Thailand as well, and they need to hide themselves from the Chinese as much as they do the DPRK border guards.
I lived in Beijing for a while and I can’t say I agree with this. For sure, China is an enormous country with much cultural surface area, so I could be wrong.
But this does not strike me as an obvious conclusion.
USA afraid of communisms spread. Sends MacArthur to Korea. He crushes the Korean communists. USA believes it to be a clean sweep. Mao surprise s USA with massive army encirclement of USA forces. USA forced to flee south and hold the line that became demarcation between north and south.
There is a 0% chance China would allow the USA to take NK.
They also love provoking Japan. Their entire origin story is about fighting against the Japanese in the 30s.
If NK actually launches an attack on a "western" country, full war will begin. If China decides to get involved, that's really on them. I wish it were otherwise, but that's how it is.
It is not stale in their psyche.
Yet I don't think anyone here is interested in war with Germany.
Also, have you noticed how in the US there arent really any “Saving Private Ryan”s about the Korean War?
Agreed. This, however, was not the substance of my comment.
The US would not tolerate an attack on Israel/Taiwan/others. That doesn’t mean that if China attacked Taiwan, the average American would feel like they had been attacked.
But, I think the Canada invasion analogy is also even too weak; Canada doesn’t exist because of the USA like NK does because of the CCP.
See Korean War.
And they damn well shouldn’t.
Thats one way to call it...
I did not bother to provide it as a source, because I just found the theory entertaining, and at the same time more realistic than "we're permanently on the verge of ww3 because of a small country with nothing more than nuisance power"
I tend to agree with you that a unilateral attack on NK would cause a terrible reaction from China ; the point of the PAA theory is that such an attack would never occur, until China, for some reason, has drop support to the NK régime ('Big countries dropping support on some protege' does not look like an impossible occurrence - I'm pretty sure there are précedents.)
The NK situation is one of the many that will not be solved on a social network.
Tips of the day, don't put too much trust into Youtube videos. There are just random dudes/girls who are good with a video editor. And most of the content they produce is either from Wikipedia or their own random opinion.
And for something as serious are NK I wouldn't trust anything that is said by a youtube video
https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/1213259/boiling-fish...
I assume they'll have a cast on this test coming out pretty soon.
2 DPRK KN23 launches
1 DPRK GLCM
1 ROK Hyunmoo-4-4 (-2B derrived) SLBM
1 ROK Supersonic AShCM
1 ROK Hyunmoo-4 SRBM
1 ROK ALCM Test
These days, NK is pretty much a convenient excuse for South Korea and Japan to beef up their military. Of course there's very little chance they'll fight in near future (the US will never allow it), but either country will still want to have enough firepower as bargaining chip: even at the best of days, you can never completely rely on the US being your benevolent protector.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/skorea-su...
However the two countries don't exactly have an amicable history. I hope we get along well with each other (and we kind of do, more or less), but Japan still has many right-wing politicians who downplay their past war crimes. On our side, some South Korean politicians love to use Japan as a convenient scapegoat and blame Korea's every social problem on past Japanese occupation.
It's less about direct military conflict between the two, and more about who gets a larger voice in any kind of issues. With the two Koreas, China, Russia, and Japan crammed in such a small area, East Asia is a tough place. You need to be seen as someone others cannot ignore.
> Political elites here are usually careful not to antagonize China, the country’s largest trading partner. But Mr. Yoon’s blunt rhetoric reflected a new phenomenon: a growing antipathy toward Beijing among South Koreans, particularly young voters whom conservative politicians are eager to win over.
> Anti-Chinese sentiment has grown so much this year that China has replaced Japan — the former colonial ruler — as the country regarded most unfavorably in South Korea, according to a joint survey by the polling company Hankook Research and the Korean newsmagazine SisaIN. In the same survey, South Koreans said they favored the United States over China six to one.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/world/asia/korea-china-el...
The world turns and life goes on. People just want prosperity.
Time can help the SK-Japanese relationship, but healing does not come easily or freely. Especially when Japan still hesitates to apologize for its past atrocities inflicted against Korea or other former colonies.
For headline readers, this is the real significance.
With Japan and Taiwan’s industrial sector and precision machinery, how long before they could develop nuclear bombs and ICBMs, maybe a few months?
Longer than the conventional invasion of Taiwan and destruction of its regime would take.
No, the only protection is Chinese belief that the US is willing to engage in full-scale war to protect Taiwan; “presence in the region” but not specifically at risk in Taiwan doesn't necessarily acheive that (ask Ukraine!)
China sees a nuclear-armed Taiwan as an existential threat.
Plus, it the US supported the development of nuclear weapons, why not the loan of nuclear weapons?
In a China vs Taiwan conflict, the Taiwanese would lose any and all ports and airstrips in the first 6 hours, and would be completely unable to receive any US help from then on. The Taiwanese state is meanwhile so deeply infiltrated that there is no chance the nukes could arrive before the PRC knew.
Beyond that, both Afghanistan and Vietnam are countries thousands of kilometers away from the US that the average person absolutely doesn't care about and that pose zero real threat.
If that's the case, why isn't it already?
You're describing a nightmarish nuclear arms race scenario [0].
Agile approach to solving world's problems?
basically NATO + Japan can pound sand and little else
Yeah, let web developers decide our future.
Also, it's 35 miles from the DMZ to the center of Seoul, but Seoul is a big city. There are parts of Seoul proper less than 25 miles from the DMZ, and the metropolitan area extends much closer still. Hundreds of thousands of people in South Korea live within comfortable artillery range of North Korea.
And, contrary to some popular theories, actually attacking your neighbor is not that useful for bargaining. All it does is to make other countries very angry and call for more hardline policies. So the best NK can do is keep its madman shtick, not actually use the missiles, and demand larger concessions. But other countries would want, in turn, some semblance of promise that NK will stop being so crazy if it gets economic aid. So we're back to stalemate.
NK rulers aren't idiots, they have access to the West (media and travel) and they know about the relative military strength and probably aren't to keen to have Democracy™ being forcefully implemented on them.
There is a solution to North Korea as it stands today. Chaos will take care of the regime eventually. Chaos is undefeated when it comes to wiping out totalitarian systems (quick, name a couple dozen 100-300 year old totalitarian regimes that are thriving today). That system won't stand forever. Plan as best as possible for what to do whenever the Kim dynasty finally implodes, whenever it inevitably gets toppled from within.
The primary concern is a Myanmar style military junta, backed by China, taking over. Then you're more or less just back to square one. Unfortunately that's by far the most likely scenario. China has zero interest in seeing a unified Korea, in the model of South Korea, on its border - they will not allow it, and they have the capability to easily prevent it.
That seems an unfair bar to set. There aren't dozens of liberal democracies with that long a history, either.
The flagship oldest democracies (Athens, Revolutionary France) didn't last any longer than that. Arguably the USA is doing the best at 250-ish years.
I don't dispute that NK's juche seems less likely to be stable in the long term than, say, Switzerland, but this seems the wrong way to go about the argument.
But I'm not a military person whatsoever so what do I know.
At this point I’d say it’s time to forget the post WW2 world and just recognize it makes no sense today to have the types of agencies and structures we’ve built in that world.
Normalize relations with them, open up trade, and try and build trust. It’s literally a pointless policy today. We do business with communists. We do business with despots.
In short, any potential invasion or regime change of North Korea would be a very long and very bloody affair, unless there are some serious changes in the status quo. Which is exactly what Kim Jung Un wants. He doesn't have any real ambitions to re-unite the Korean peninsula, or to liberalize the nation and re-enter the world stage. His only goal is maintaining power, which is exactly what this is.
"They have a close special relationship and China is often considered to be North Korea's closest ally. China and North Korea have a mutual aid and co-operation treaty, which is currently the only defense treaty either country has with any nation." [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93North_Korea_rela....
Even in the extreme case of North Korea nuking Japan, it would still lead to an extremely complex international situation. The US retaliating for Japan with a nuclear strike or any similar situation of extreme force would be a far too risky of a move.
Not only is NK important to China strategically as a buffer between themselves and the US friendly South Korea, but the Chinese people feel a kinship with the people of NK, not entirely dissimilar to the way the US views Canada culturally. Aggressive retaliation would unquestionably make China an aggressive and active enemy of the US (or whoever decided it was their job to retaliate).
North Korea's proximity to China, not just physically but culturally as well, makes the issue far more complex than if a rogue nation where make similar threats.
They say to give peace a chance. Maybe, in some situations, it is war that should be given a chance.
Which is why I suggested to hand off North Korea to China once its government has been defeated. China will use the cheap labor and vast mineral resources of the country, NK's citizens will see major improvements in their quality of life.
You also lost Iraq considering you killed 200,000 innocent men, women, and children, setup a terrible government, and a military that conceded so much, ISIS took over large parts of the country and neighboring countries. You had to start yet another war to clean up and now are just awaiting the next ISIS-like event because you destabilized an entire region.
These wars were total and utter disasters and crimes against humanity. Stop defending them.
Iraq today is a free-standing nation, capable of charting their own path, courtesy of their significant oil revenues. The US is no longer required to prop them up and the US does not dictate their policies nor does it occupy the nation.
The civilian deaths you're referring to were the result of a civil war between the Iraqi people. They were killing each other. The long oppressed Shia majority and the Sunni minority. That's not uncommon throughout history, see: US, Russian, French civil wars, to name a few prominent examples. The US also butchered itself in a civil war, we were no better in our internal conflict. The French, British and other European powers were not morally responsible for those deaths, despite the elaborate roles the European empires played in helping to cause the US civil war (eg European slavery), as well as influencing or shaping the US colonies and infant US nation.
It took many decades for the US to organize itself properly after its founding, it was a very messy process. And even then, it ended up in a bloody civil war, before a greater degree of stability was achieved. Why should Iraq be held to the absurd expectation of instantaneous, miraculous stability so soon after regaining their independence from Saddam's dictatorship and then the chaotic US & allied forces occupation? Iraq is commonly treated quite unfairly in judgment when it comes to a political process that can take a long time under the best of circumstances; they're held to an unreasonable standard that just about no nation could live up to, especially given the context.
If I set a house on fire, any deaths that result from people trampling each other or jumping out of windows are my fault. If I claimed they liked each other or committed suicide, I'd be laughed out of court and (rightly) into prison.
The Taliban did not plan or take part in the 9/11 attacks.
Oh, how quickly people forget.
It would have been closer to hundreds of thousands. And it would have cost tens of thousands of American lives as well. To defeat and pacify North Korea you'd have to occupy the nation with an enormous military force, upwards of a million total soldiers or more. That's assuming China tolerated it, which is very unlikely. The terrain in North Korea is almost ideal for guerilla fighters, and it would present a brutal challenge to any occupying forces.
China was significantly responsible for making North Korea what it is today. They like having North Korea as a stick to poke the US, South Korea and Japan with. North Korea is a wildcard that makes the region very complicated and dangerous for the anti-China alliance. They have very little interest in seeing it dismantled. If China had wanted North Korea, they would have taken it a long time ago; it's a rather trivial bit of land next to China; but in its present use, North Korea can be exceptionally useful to China, it's a net positive asset in its present form. They're already a quasi vassal of China, they're hyper dependent on China for almost everything. China gets a lot of upside from the arrangement, with few downsides.
> The US and SK could have handed over NK to China as an industrial colony for all we care
Absolutely not. That's among the worst things the US and South Korea could have done. Assisting China in territorial expansion, de facto helping China to conquer another part of Asia, would be grotesque.
There's no moral argument for claiming other nations have a right to dictate to the North Korean people that they are not to have their own nation. The two Koreas have been separate for a long time now, it's not like that separation just happened a few decades ago. If they want to unite with South Korea, then they should be allowed to. If they don't want to, that should be respected as well. Forcibly handing them off to China and dissolving their nation without their input would be an extreme violation of human rights.
North Korea as a nation belongs, properly, to the people of North Korea. Not to China. Not to the US. Not to South Korea.
There were estimates of massive SK casualties just via artillery strikes. (1M+, Seoul destroyed, ...). NK also had chemical/biological weapons...
There was also always a threat of nuclear escalation via China if US went too far...
> The US and SK could have handed over NK to China as an industrial colony for all we care
China wants what is currently in place, it's doubtful they would have not intervened as they did in Korean war after which war becomes one of attrition and keeping the Chinese out of SK...
NK was almost certainly not going to initiate a war, but they had everything in place to decimate SK if one began by the 90s at least.
The joke is: "when US claimed you have wmd, you better actually have it"...
NK has been behaving quite bad comparing to some other countries that got US invasion. The reason that they were not invaded, is mostly that they indeed have the stuff that can scare away US.
Revising that was decades later would have been political impossible, ethically evil, and set off the same China/SU hostility chain that leads to WWIII.
We are constantly giving war a chance. The problem is we rarely give peace a chance. Imagine if instead of blowing up children and women in Afghanistan for two decades we asked the Taliban to the parliamentary table and built a government with them? They'd be the most powerful party, but it would have saved tens of thousands of innocent civilians lives and literally everything would be better off today there. but instead we listened to people like you, fought a foolish war, put in a "democracy" that, of course, failed within weeks. The same way it would have in NK, assuming a second NK conflict wouldn't lead to WWIII, which it most likely would.
Remember when you say go to war, you're asking the West to murder hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children. America is happy to do that and calls its "democracy" but they are simply crimes against humanity writ large. The war on terror has at least 380,000 innocent civilians killed. Stop killing people. Stop making war the default goto. Give peace chance. Its not your job to be the world police or tell China or NK what to do. You're just a bloodthirsty keyboard commando who wants to contribute to crimes against humanity. If I was you I'd reflect on what you've written today and think about why you're carrying water for the mass murder and human rights violation machine we call the US military.
There's no wholly good answer here. There's a valid argument for both; you're making the latter, if I may be so presumptuous.
If you choose not to intervene, you have still made a choice.
"Never Again", yet Rwandan genocide, Serbian massacre, Uyghurs in camps, Darfur, Syria, Daesh, Qatari slaves... whether you intervene or not people will suffer.