From "The Ivanka Trump of North Korea? Oh, Please" by Frank Bruni in the NYT.
The top-rated comment at the NYT, with 586 up-votes, is:
Trump is as evil as Kim, he just hasn't had as much opportunity to exercise it. But every opportunity he has to show his evil, he has enthusiastically embraced. No doubt he would execute his perceived enemies if he thought he could get away with it. I'm sure he's jealous of Kim's military parades and complete control over his citizens. It's perfectly fair to compare the two. Ivanka and Yo-jong have nothing to do with it.ADDED: What's unusual about "trying to tell the world that a sexist really wants to empower women, that a racist really cares about equal opportunity and that a narcissistic plutocrat is acting in the high-minded interests of the little people"? Let me propose that exactly that could be said about virtually every American politician. I think it's to the credit of all the sexist, racist, narcissistic plutocrats in government that they can occasionally manage to do something that helps women, minorities, and the little people. It's normal to expect the champions of these politicians to point out these positive efforts. That the doers of these good deeds were hampered by their deeply embedded and not-pretty human impulses could be pointed out as a reason to be impressed by their accomplishments, but their champions choose to keep quiet about such things. That's also not surprising.
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211 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 211 of 211@Gahrie:
So abandon an ally to attempt to placate an aggressive murderous dictator....sounds like a winning plan.
None of those courses of action entail abandoning an ally. For example, we have no mutual defense treaty with Israel and have no troops stationed there. Can anyone can conclude that America's relationship with Israel over the years has been one of abandonment?
I guess we've missed a lot of such chances...think of all the goodwill we could have earned selling Hitler Zyklon - B!
I would normally accuse you of argumentum ad Hitlerum, but one thing the Trump candidacy revealed is that Godwin's Law is dead. Never mind that the Germany of the 1930s and 1940s was, by orders of magnitude, a greater threat to world peace than North Korea. It's absurd to even attempt that comparison. And even then, the US could likely have stayed completely out of the European theatre of the Second World War, and Hitler would still have been toast. Buchanan makes a compelling argument in his dense book Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. In the end I was never fully convinced by Buchanan's argument, but it is a very thought provoking work. At the very least it should give pause to the seemingly endless number of people with very glib, superficial opinions of the state of world affairs in the 1930s.
"Iran and North Korea are attempting to develop the ability to attack us, and have expressed the intention of doing so when and if possible."
When has Iran expressed the intent of attacking the U.S.? Why do you consider claims by North Korea that they will "retaliate" against the U.S. to be anything more than theatrical rhetoric?
Iran is not developing nukes at this time, as confirmed by our own intelligence community, and if they ever did--as North Korea is--why do you think they want them as offensive, rather than defensive, weapons?
(I don't cheer any nations developing nukes, as the more nations that have them, and the more nukes there are in the world, the greater the chances someone will use them, accidentally or purposely. I think all nuke-possessing nations should disarm ALL their nukes...but that will never happen.)
Listen guys you are not going to convince these neocons.
They want another war. In Asia. With the almost certain participation of China.
They will not be satisfied with anything less.
@Sebastian:
The old policy failed in part for the main reason associated with the factor you have stressed (correctly), namely that regime survival is paramount. Nuclear weapons are a rogue regime's ultimate blackmail tool.
On this issue of "blackmail," it is a situation that the US can easily manage because it is one we have been managing for decades. The US has already been faced with adversaries with nuclear arsenals. Stalin's Russia and Mao's China were nightmarish places that we were (and still are) forced to accommodate. The North Korean threat is much less significant than either of those. South Korea is is more than capable of defending itself from any threats from the North. And with their security not being subsidized by the American taxpayer, South Korea would be incentivized to take a more active role in managing tensions on the peninsula.
But first and foremost the US needs to reconcile itself with the realities of a multipolar world with regional power blocs. Our attempt, since the end of the Second World War and especially after the Cold, to build a global hegemony under a "new world order" has been a destructive, counterproductive waste of resources whose main effect has been to dismantle the US industrial base and import third-world cheap labor migrants.
Of course, the NK posture is very different than that of the USSR and China. In neither case did the policy of deterrence involve the kind of blackmail practiced by the Norks. In neither case did they directly threaten the capital of our main ally. In neither case did regime survival involve extracting concessions of the sort you proposed. Blackmail applies to the Norks in a way it does not in the other cases.
The point is not how "easily" we manage the problem, the problem is how. To adopt your debating posture, I never said we couldn't manage them "easily." Of course, from the point of view of our secondary preference, for a situation in which the NK regime would not exist, the calculations become a bit more difficult, since we would be maximizing different preferences simultaneously. Cold War policy was not entirely consistent, to be sure, but regime change in the USSR remained a goal, and rightly so.
The notion that the U.S. has tried to build a "global hegemony" over the past generation I find baffling, coming from you. Our direct and deliberate role in facilitating the rise of China is one obvious counterpoint. I can't think of a region where we exercised such presumed "hegemony." Let's leave the import of third-world immigrants for another day, but I think the causal connections are a tad more complicated here. For the sake of argument, I'll posit that the depletion of the industrial base and the importation of immigrants have more to do with elite desire to diminish American "hegemony" than to increase it.
But yes, the South Koreans can and should do relatively more. I think that will happen in any case. Though I favor a tougher posture on NK than you, I am not in favor of the moral hazard and free riding we have also created through our alliances.
@Sebastian:
In neither case did the policy of deterrence involve the kind of blackmail practiced by the Norks.
It involved much worse. The Soviet Union invaded Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. What could the US really do about it? Next to nothing. Because no American in their right mind would choose nuclear destruction over the political independence of Hungary or Czechoslovakia. Similarly, the Russia of today must accommodate us. They were furious over our intervention in the Balkans in the late 90s, and our support for an independent Kosovo, but what could they really do about it? Nothing.
The notion that the U.S. has tried to build a "global hegemony" over the past generation I find baffling, coming from you. Our direct and deliberate role in facilitating the rise of China is one obvious counterpoint. I can't think of a region where we exercised such presumed "hegemony."
To mirror you, I find this statement baffling. An opening to China was a strategic move against the Soviets. In fact, after the Soviet Union fail, one of the main obsession of neoconservatives in the 1990s was to "contain" China, making obvious parallels to Kennan's containment policy towards the USSR. And we have pursued this aggressively. US defense posture in East Asia has been explicitly "hub and spoke." That is, instead of pursuing a "NATO of the east," we strengthen bi-lateral security arrangements with as many countries bordering or near China's borders as possible. Philippines, Thailand, and Taiwan were all designated major non-NATO major allies under the Bush administration in pursuit of this strategy. Obama's so called "pivot to Asia" was another piece.
As far as as a "region where we exercised such presumed 'hegemony,'" I would immediately suggest the Western hemisphere since at least the era of the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which is routinely misrepresented in interventionist arguments. Again, imagine if China or Russia established land bases and mutual defense pacts with Latin American countries. The US would consider this a massively provocative act. In fact, it was the entire justification for attacking Nicaragua. It was considered unthinkable that the US would allow a rival power to establish itself in the Americas. Yet, we push our forces right up to the border of these countries and then act like their aggressive, irrational maniacs for considering this a threat to their security and acting accordingly.
Though I favor a tougher posture on NK than you, I am not in favor of the moral hazard and free riding we have also created through our alliances.
Just please explain what this "tougher posture" would entail. What more do you believe we can do to the North Koreans than we are doing now? At what point do you believe that the US should use aggressive military force (i.e. aerial bombardment) against the North Koreans?
War. In Asia.
What is it good for?
Just please explain what this "tougher posture" would entail. What more do you believe we can do to the North Koreans than we are doing now? At what point do you believe that the US should use aggressive military force (i.e. aerial bombardment) against the North Koreans?
Help SK, Japan, and Taiwan get their own nukes.
Keep our presence in the Philippines.
Make better friends with Vietnam. Pointedly increase trade there and help them attract capital.
Participate in joint military exercises with all of our friends and reinforce an alliance against China.
Keep the price of Oil low by increasing our domestic production.(Russia)
Keep reducing regulations on our own economy and be a more competitive target for capital. Rebuild our manufacturing base. (China)
Easy peasy.
@Achilles:
Easy peasy.
Except none of those items would result in denuclearization of the North, the supposed policy goal. Let's review:
Help SK, Japan, and Taiwan get their own nukes.
South Koreans and Japanese have not shown a great desire for nuclear weapons, and Japan particularly has an entrenched anti-nuclear culture. One of the supposed goals of our defense treaties with the South and Japan is to keep them from going nuclear by offering them protection under the so called "nuclear umbrella."
China would never permit Taiwan to go nuclear and would likely be willing to risk a major offensive against Taiwan to prevent this from happening. If China attacked Taiwan, we obviously are not going to risk nuclear destruction over the political independence of Taiwan.
Keep our presence in the Philippines.
We have had a mutual defense treaty with Philippines since the early 1950s. And we have had forces intermittently there for much longer. How would that have anything to do with North Korea?
Participate in joint military exercises with all of our friends and reinforce an alliance against China.
Again, been doing that for decades. An alliance against China, our largest trading partner?
Keep reducing regulations on our own economy and be a more competitive target for capital. Rebuild our manufacturing base. (China)
The US is already the single largest target for foreign direct investment. And how do you couple "reducing regulations on our own economy" with "rebuild our manufacturing base?" In a free market, deregulated environment it makes sense to open your plants in China or Bangladesh in order to lower labor costs. Likewise, in such an environment it makes sense to import cheap low-skilled labor to keep wages low. Both are part and parcel of the so called neoliberal agenda since the 1970s, which has been so destructive to societies.
Amazing that a penal penetration on 11/8/16 can go so far up as to damage the brain stem. Bruni still hurts.
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