Post inauguration Trump:

[Dave The Man]

[Mugwump]

^Because they are our ally, Dave. When you are a small kid in a neighbourhood with a lot of big kids, you need allies. Would you prefer China, the other really big kid in the neighbourhood, with whom we have almost nothing in common, and which was actually the country that created North Korea (and killed many thousands of UN troops to do so in 1951) ?

Allies do not have to be like you - they just have to be more like you than the other neighbourhood thugs.

I have some misgivings about Trump's sabre-rattling, but I do accept that a NK with nukes is a hideous prospect and a real danger to the security of the whole region. It seems an insoluble problem, but the US is going the right way about it in trying to convince China that it needs to tame its Frankenstein pet state.

[David]

I think it's really great that we have a war with North Korea on the cards now. That seems like something the world needed. I just hope Don can fit it in between all the other miseries he's inflicting upon the world because four years goes like that and he's not going to want to stick around to do the cleaning up.

[swoop42]

Nothing pumps up the polls of a conservative government better than the talk of war or the fight against terrorism.

North Korea has had a long line of despot leaders and the thought of them becoming the latest nuclear armed nation not that comforting but in reality despite the sabre rattling I doubt he Kim has the want to strike first and invite a response that would be the end of the long reign of his family.

I don't see any justification for the United States at this time to take military action that will only lead to a war costing untold lives most of which wont be there own citizens.

Cool heads are needed.

[Mugwump]

^ So you are prepared to accept a North Korea with nuclear arms and ICBMs ? You see no great problems ahead with an apparently mentally unstable homicidal dictator having that capability ? Or the signals it sends to others ?

It is a game of risk, and there are no easy answers ; but pressing China to finally act on its alien baby is a good first step.

[HAL]

problems with an unstable homicidal dictator having that capability is a game of risk and there no easy answers ; but pressing China to act on its alien baby is a good first step are no easy answers ; but pressing China to. I suppose that makes sense.

[Skids]

[Dave The Man]

[David]

Regardless, Trump has been amping up the rhetoric big time, and that puts North Korea further on the edge.

NK is a constant threat, but also a contained one � being a nuclear power is the only card they have to play, and playing it will mean being instantly annihilated, so it suits them to remain in a stalemate for ever. They're like a psychotic wasp in a jar in a crowded room yelling to anyone who'll listen that they're about to escape and sting everyone to death. Trump, on the other hand, is the guy who's opening the jar so that he can teach the wasp a lesson. He's taken the bait. He might well kill the wasp, but not before a few innocent bystanders have been stung.

Also, Mugwump, I think you're overestimating China's support for North Korea. The Kims were a useful attack dog to have around in the past, but I think they've long since become a problem for China as much as the US.

[Mugwump]

A very good metaphor, David (no sarcasm, it's quality). But let's play game theory. Say NK has nukes. As their unsustainable regime moves toward collapse, as it will one day, do you think it likely they will conduct an act of outrageous aggression towards SK, confident that they are now invulnerable ? Even if they do not move towards collapse, would their most rational strategy be to conclude that the US is never going to risk a strike on its own soil to save SK, and that they can therefore take over the whole of Korea, as they wish ?

Your psychotic wasp can smash open the jar quite comfortably if it chooses, but it does not do so for fear of the insecticide that will be deployed if it does. Nuclear weapons are a vaccine against the insecticide. And the wasp is evil.

There is no easy answer, here. The only way through this is for .China and the Us to collaborate in making it worth NK's while not to go nuclear. That will only work if China cuts off the blood supply it has always given its devil child.

[Mugwump]

[swoop42]

[stui magpie]

A lot of the stuff I've read has been in favour of Trumps actions on NK and his sudden cooperating with China. Most seem to agree that during Obama's watch, all that was achieved was that NK increased their level of armament and that status quo can't continue.

China has apparently started knocking back coal imports from NK, which may be just stage managed guff or may be a sign they're actually putting pressure on.

Trump has put the pressure on China by publically painting NK as China's problem to fix, but if they can't, the USA will. Put China in an invidious position.

[Morrigu]

[Mugwump]

^ Morrigu,

You seem to think that we are ok without allies, and that allowing a state like North Korea to have nuclear weapons with ICBMs is preferable to backing the USA, with its long history of bailing out the democracies - including us in 1942 - with its blood and treasure. Perhaps you do not recall the Cold War, when we wondered every day whether the unthinkable might happen. Well, something similar is on the way with someone a lot less stable than the Soviet waxworks.

You decry the US's foreign broils, and they are clearly blemished. But the US fought for (and saved) South Korea in 1951. Does it seem significant to you that the Korea which was backed by a great democracy now lives in prosperity and freedom, while the China-backed puppet is a prison camp ? Do you know what happens to US protectorates once the US army leaves ? They mostly become rich and free, if they have any cultural capacity to do so : Western Europe, South Korea, Japan. Compare these with the communist-backed protectorates in the last 60 years.

As for Nicaragua, El Salvador.... pfft - petty pro-Communist regimes and insurgencies that murdered dissidents themselves, and yearned to be Soviet satellites and missile bases in the backyard of the US. The US rightly armed the anti-Soviet forces in those countries to thwart one of the most brutal, mendacious, corrupt, incompetent and imperialist states in the modern era, just a few notches above Nazism. That sneaky little 1980s Leftist narrative about the innocence of these little baby Cuba banana- republics-on-the-Vostok penetrated very deeply, but it was always bullshit, as eastern Europe knew.

On the other hand, the North Korea you paint as harmless has starved millions of its own people while it keeps them locked in a prison camp and tortures dissidents and their families. It actually explodes nuclear bombs (you are right, Swoop, they have them). It also routinely threatens to start a nuclear war and takes steps to acquire the means. Read the Justice Michael Kirby report into NK, and tell me whether you think it�s a harmless thing, for its own people, its region, or the world.

Perhaps you don�t feel you need powerful allies, but history says that this is a very dangerous assumption. And if you do need them, whom would you choose ? Indonesia ? China, a despotic society with no freedom of speech or the press, with environmental despoliation on a grand scale, zero rights for animals and a sponsor of torture states like NK ? The China that made North Korea while the US was making South Korea ? The China that supported the Khmer Rouge ? That murdered millions of its citizens through stupid self-inflicted famines and purges of intellectuals ? Good luck with that one. There is much to like about modern China, and I have spent much time there - but it is still a despotism with the aim of restoring its global power and a roiling nationalism.

As for Cambodia, there is no country - Australia included - that has participated in international affairs without much to be ashamed of. By all means criticise what the US did in Cambodia, while it tried to win a war that was consuming the lives of its young men. I don't like it, and (like most Americans today) I think it was wrong. But actually, it was a hell of a lot more justified in the context of saving American lives than Australia (a country with a white Australia policy when Cambodia was being bombed) is in incarcerating would-be immigrants for the sake of materialistic convenience.

And for all that, Australia is still a good actor on the world stage - a democracy with freedom of the press, open and fair elections, a constitution under law � all things which we got, in part, by emulating America's federation when we coined our own in 1901.

Yes, having allies has consequences. Sometimes you have to commit a small number of troops into danger. If you don't think it is worth it, then that is your right. But history suggests that it's a pretty lazy gamble in an unstable and dangerous world. I don�t think there is a right answer to North Korea � but letting them have nuclear weapons and allowing a new cold war with a lunatic regime is a bad gambit. Pressuring China to change the game and head off a new Cold War with the Dear Leader is probably the least worst option. I hate Trump, but we always knew there would be good and bad in the roll of the dice.

I don't think war is anywhere near happening. But I do think that China is being awakened to its responsibility and that is a good thing.