@noxy so I think we will do nothing but more sanctions in the hope it will work, when everyone knows it won't.

they will eventually have an ICBM that can re-enter and target the entire US and there's nothing we can really do short of trigger nuclear holocaust.

@Elizafox My point wasn't that America wants nuclear war, but rather that the government wants to use the exaggerated threat of it to justify further sanctions and non-nuclear military actions against a third-world country. The orange man is not the only one supporting this.

@noxy a third-world country run by an unpredictable man who wants to tip a delicate balance of power in his favour.

@noxy Keeping in mind the Korean war never ended, and that Korean unification is something the North wants more than the South, on their terms no less.

@Elizafox This is a justification for American meddling because...?

@noxy Because it's our fault it got so fucked up to begin with. And because a regional struggle there could go nuclear. And that will affect *everyone.*

Bring Japan into this (we already have a complicated thing going on there, basically postwar legacy) and Korea's beef with Japan for the colonial thing they've never gotten over and it's a recipe for disaster.

I don't know if there's ANY good answer.

@noxy We made a horrible mistake intervening to begin with.

In 1952, we thought the Korean War would be over in a few days. The intervention of the PRC wasn't even on the radar, a country with 1/20 the GDP of America and was recovering from a bloody communist revolt.

Then the PRC invaded with a force of 300,000 and overwhelmed the Americans, we outgunned them but they had us outmanned, and the air war was a stalemate due to Russian training of DPRK and PRC pilots.

@noxy And now shit is so fucking *fucked* beyond belief.

@noxy And now thanks to the stalemate we and the UN helped prop up now we've reached this point: one of the countries is going nuclear, and it's likely in self-defense, the other will too.

We didn't even see it as a threat because at the time, Korea was agrarian and was basically pillaged by Japan. How the hell are a bunch of peasants gonna build a nuke? We assumed that right up until they built the damn things. .

@noxy What choice do we have? If we leave, ROK will have nukes very soon, and it will be nuclear war on the Korean peninsula, with the north backed by the PRC and it's... just gonna be a disaster.

@noxy ROK can be nuclear in a few years.

@Elizafox Without arguing any of your points (plenty of which are totally valid), I still feel comfortable saying that American military action can do nothing good in DPRK. "Doing good" certainly isn't the US military's goal. And under Trump (and his cronies), in what way does America have any right to judge another nation as unstable?

@Elizafox @noxy Were there good options back then? Should we have decided that one nation invading another is the sovereign right of the aggressor nation and let the cards fall where they may?

@noxy @USBloveDog We were fucking idiots and should never have done it. Now we're just trying to maintain an uneasy peace.

@Elizafox @USBloveDog There's no "peace" because DPRK lost some 1/5 of their population and had their country basically razed to the ground BY THE US. 1.5 million civilian deaths. It was a genocide for which the US has not been held accountable.

@noxy @Elizafox That's what happens when countries decide to invade others. See also: the Third Reich, especially the east half

@USBloveDog @Elizafox I agree with you. The difference, though, is that they were held accountable and at least some of them were actually punished. The Third Reich didn't go on to be the world's self-appointed police officer

@Elizafox I would never claim to know a perfect solution to the situation; as a white American, that's not my place. I am, however, 100% sure that Americans being led to believe that North Korea is an immediate physical threat to them can only do harm.

@bob @Elizafox unfortunately, I don't think so :/ I think impeachment is unlikely to begin with, but even if it does happen, there's an entire military-industrial complex that demands a new war. It's not just republicans with "skin in the game," so to speak. Regardless, the rest of Trump's admin shares most of his goals, and will benefit from a common "enemy" to unify the country under their fascist leadership.

@bob @noxy I'd be inclined to believe it's just that, but this issue has been smouldering for a long time.

@Elizafox @bob Oh, absolutely. Part of what makes this whole mess so frightening is that people on both sides of the aisle have interests in escalating the situation, entirely separate from Trump as an individual. It's not like republicans have a monopoly on warmongering by any means; Obama was as bomb-happy as any president, if not moreso.

Also, for the record, I think that having Mike Pence replace Trump would be much worse.