After the weak and inept leadership shown by France and Germany in their response to Russia's aggression the hopes for a EU defense capability is all but finished. Eastern European countries would rather have the US to defend them [1].
And I think more appreciation needs to be given to the US for supporting Ukraine in those early days because if Russia over-ran Kyiv it's quite possible that Belarus, Moldova, Estonia etc could have been next. US military leadership can credibly be argued to have saved Europe.
[1] https://twitter.com/ulrichspeck/status/1661710156944535554
Why on earth would Russia invade its closest ally? It is alarming that we see such confident justifications of US foreign policy from people who don't know the basic facts of IR and world history.
"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography"
And countries like Poland are seeing a unique opportunity to fill the power vacuum in order to change the government to one that isn't interested in being part of Russia's sphere of influence.
If Putin was successful in Ukraine it's not inconceivable he would have rather have invaded rather than risk it becoming pro-EU, joining NATO etc.
A leaked internal strategy document from Vladimir Putin’s executive office and obtained by Yahoo News lays out a detailed plan on how Russia plans to take full control over neighboring Belarus in the next decade under the pretext of a merger between the two countries. The document outlines in granular detail a creeping annexation by political, economic and military means of an independent but illiberal European nation by Russia, which is an active state of war in its bid to conquer Ukraine through overwhelming force.
“Russia’s goals with regards to Belarus are the same as with Ukraine,” Michael Carpenter, the U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, told Yahoo News. “Only in Belarus, it relies on coercion rather than war. Its end goal is still wholesale incorporation.”
According to the document, issued in fall 2021, the end goal is the formation of a so-called Union State of Russia and Belarus by no later than 2030. Everything involved in the merger of the two countries has been considered, including the “harmonization” of Belarusian laws with those of the Russian Federation; a “coordinated foreign and defense policy” and “trade and economic cooperation … on the basis of the priority” of Russian interests; and “ensuring the predominant influence of the Russian Federation in the socio-political, trade-economic, scientific-educational and cultural-information spheres.”
> the strategy confirms what has long been obvious and, at times, openly acknowledged, by both Moscow and Minsk.
The Union State is not a secret conspiracy, it is openly recognized by both countries.
How is this any different than a country, say Ukraine, joining European Union & NATO under substantial political pressure?
more than once
The alternative was that the entire peninsula would be "North Korea". And then there would never be any chance of formulating a functional democratic society.
Unless you believe a unified korea without US intervention but still with USSR support would suddenly overthrow that repressive regime, that was never going to produce a free society.
> In the fall of 1946, the US military authorized elections to an interim legislature for southern Korea, but the results were clearly fraudulent. Even General Hodge privately wrote that right-wing "strong-arm" methods had been used to control the vote. The winners were almost all rightists, including [Syngman] Rhee supporters, even though a survey by the American military government that summer had found that 70 percent of 8,453 southern Koreans polled said they supported socialism, 7 percent communism, and only 14 percent capitalism. [...]
> Chung Koo-Hun, the observant young student of the late 1940s, said of the villagers' attitude: "The Americans simply re-employed the pro-Japanese Koreans whom the people hated." [...]
> Seventy of the 115 top Korean officials in the Seoul administration in 1947 had held office during the Japanese occupation.
> In the southern city of Taegu, people verged on starvation. When 10,000 demonstrators rallied on October 1, 1946, police opened fire, killing many. Vengeful crowds then seized and killed policeman, and the US military declared martial law. The violence spread across the provinces, peasants murdering government officials, landlords, and especially police, detested as holdovers from Japanese days. American troops joined the police in suppressing the uprisings. Together they killed uncounted hundreds of Koreans.
> American anthropologist Cornelius Osgood, spending much of 1947 in a village west of Seoul, watched as police carried young men off to jail by the truckload. A "mantle of fear" had fallen over once peaceful valleys, he wrote. The word "communist," he said, "seemed to mean 'just any young man of a village.'" On August 7, 1947, the US military government outlawed the southern communists, the Korean Worker's Party. Denied a peaceful political route, more and more leftist militants chose an armed struggle for power.
quotes from The Bridge at No Gun Ri
Imagine if they weren't defeated. Because they where one of the most preeminent countries in the world before defeat as well.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhejiang-Jiangxi_campaign
[1] https://www.historynet.com/jimmy-doolittle-and-the-tokyo-rai...
Before attacking the US, they had Korea and Manchury invaded, and Russia in check. The extent of their dominance relative to their country size was really impressive, and they went for the US because they needed to feel unstoppable.
Then of coure, they were stopped. But none of the base roots of the war were removed, the emperor was allowed to stay, they made token trial of random generals who committed atrocities.
But no one was allowed to officialy question:
- the US carpet bombing entire Tokyo (for comparison we questionned Germany carpet bombing EU towns) and dropping the bombs on civilians
- the Japan's spiritual leader and basic phyolosophy. Really, imagine Hitler being excused as a mere puppet and staying as a philosophical leader after the war.
In that respect, The compromise the US took looks to me like the critical difference from Germany, where they could move on and jointly create the EU. Instead, Japan and Korea are still barking at each other over the war almost a century later.
People think the existence of emperor (thousand years long) itself wasn't the root cause (or at least think it's better than changing everything), unlike Hitler.
I'd argue it's a different story looking from inside Japan. A sizeable part of the population aren't questioning going to war in the first place, and only put the blame on the military for having attacked the US. Basically they blame the country for having been too greedy, and see the current jp/usa relationship in that light ("why do we need to import so much US beef ?" "Because we lost" is something you'd hear with only half sarcasm)
That is to me a fundamental problem that was one of the root cause of the war, and stil causes issues to this day. The lasting conclusion should have been "don't invade your neighboors", not "don't attack the US".
To be clear, I don't think Japan will ever invade Korea or China again, but their diplomatic relations are still somewhere stuck in that age on both side. And if Japan had a venue where the international community wouldn't beat the shit out of them, they'd still go for full domination.
Japan took Korea from China, hence it being a Sino-Japanese war. Japan took control of Manchuria form Russia. They took Indochina from the French.
I think it is fair to say that Japan was following the dominant playbook of the era. They were literally taking colonies held by other western powers, as the western powers often did.
I think that is a pretty high expectation to hold for any former or current empire. Outside of Germany, I can't think of one who drew that lasting conclusion. I don't the English, French, Dutch, or Spanish spend a lot of time regretting empire. The US only makes small noise about the conquest of the native Americans. Literally nobody cares about the USA taking Florida, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines from Spain, or Texas and California from Mexico.
Given this context, it it pretty easy to take "don't attack the USA and loose" as the lesson. The success of the USA is global example of what happens when you don't lose existential wars.
Hawaii, where the Japanese would ultimately attack, was itself annexed by the US in 1904, roughly the same time Japan was expanding in Korea.
As Winston Churchill said, history is written by the victors
How people seriously can blame North Korea for poverty if it is deliberately being suffocated by USA for decades?
Also having actually been to the country the issue isn't sanctions. It's the lack of foreign investment and restrictions on business. Many China businesses for example would love to have broader access to the North Korean market not just for exports but as a source of cheap labour. But this is not happening because North Korea is fearful of their population being 'indoctrinated'.
Stop resisting and I'll stop choking you.
And nobody in this world including the US wants North Korea to continue to be a relic from the 1970s. Prosperity lifts us all.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea%E2%80%93United_S....