@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.