The US and Korea

[Mole 4331]

1 hour ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

It made North Korea stronger and more indoctrinated/in-prisoned. 

 

Serious question, how is this possible? 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

7 minutes ago, Mole said:

Serious question, how is this possible? 

Trump tends to have that effect 

[JimmyJames 12271]

Trump made Kim Jong un a hero in his country, further ensured that he won’t lose his rein, and made America look like a bunch of putzs. That’s all he did at that bullshit “summit.” 

Trumpkins rejoice. 

[Mole 4331]

I get it, Trump is terrible, but all the hand-wringing over giving North Korea propaganda seems to be a bit much. I don't see a scenario where the country is significantly more locked down than it already is. Was Un at any risk of losing power with the status quo?

There reaches a point where things aren't going to get noticeably worse. A country where eating bark is a viable option has probably reached that point. Outside of the nuclear issues, which is obviously pretty important, I'm inclined to think any change with North Korea is a positive simply because it would be difficult to get much worse.

Edited June 25, 2018 by Mole

[Mojo Hand 4580]

Sure, Kim is always at risk of a coup.  Much of what he does is aimed at preventing one.    The propaganda he got from the meeting likely solidified his hold on the country.  It's one thing for him to claim that he's staring down the big bad United States.  It's another to actually get photos and video to prove it. 

Edited June 25, 2018 by Mojo Hand

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

We lost so much leverage with the Summit.  

No other president EXCEPT Trump would try to spin that Summit as a win the way he did.  

It was embarrassing and we got absolutely nothing.  The NK threat to mainland USA was way overblown due to MAD.  The threat to South Korea is just as real as before the Summit.  In fact, we’re still technically at war.

China and NK played us and I hate it.

[sheeeit 129]

25 minutes ago, Mojo Hand said:

Sure, Kim is always at risk of a coup.  Much of what he does is aimed at preventing one.    The propaganda he got from the meeting likely solidified his hold on the country.  It's one thing for him to claim that he's staring down the big bad United States.  It's another to actually get photos and video to prove it. 

Obviously it is way too early to know much of anything, but I do take some issue with the above.  The people of NK that are eating bark and pulling tape worms out of their stomachs could care less if Un stared down the US.  The economy of NK is just as bad today as it was before the Summit.  If conditions do not change on the ground in NK then the exact same situation will exist for a coup.  

Saying the US lost leverage or gave Un some modicum of acceptance is fun to talk about and bash trump about but it has exactly zero practical affect.

[Mojo Hand 4580]

2 minutes ago, sheeeit said:

Obviously it is way too early to know much of anything, but I do take some issue with the above.  The people of NK that are eating bark and pulling tape worms out of their stomachs could care less if Un stared down the US.  The economy of NK is just as bad today as it was before the Summit.  If conditions do not change on the ground in NK then the exact same situation will exist for a coup.  

Saying the US lost leverage or gave Un some modicum of acceptance is fun to talk about and bash trump about but it has exactly zero practical affect.

People eating bark don't stage coups.  Well-fed generals stage coups.  They are absolutely paying attention to whether Kim is strong or weak and his standing in the world. 

[Caracara 41]

32 minutes ago, Mojo Hand said:

People eating bark don't stage coups.  Well-fed generals stage coups.  They are absolutely paying attention to whether Kim is strong or weak and his standing in the world. 

That's true. Also, there have been a few shakeups at the top of the tree, leading up to the summit, per several reports including this CNN link.  Of course it's up for interpretation or dismissal.

 

https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/04/asia/north-korea-military-leadership-intl/index.html

[sheeeit 129]

36 minutes ago, Mojo Hand said:

People eating bark don't stage coups.  Well-fed generals stage coups.  They are absolutely paying attention to whether Kim is strong or weak and his standing in the world. 

I am curious, what do you think would be the reason that the well-fed generals would stage a coup?

[Mojo Hand 4580]

33 minutes ago, sheeeit said:

I am curious, what do you think would be the reason that the well-fed generals would stage a coup?

Same reasons as always, I suppose. To obtain power and wealth.  

[sheeeit 129]

55 minutes ago, Mojo Hand said:

Same reasons as always, I suppose. To obtain power and wealth.  

Maybe.  It still doesn't make much sense to me.  If the generals were ready to pounce pre-summit and then Un gets some perceived respect from the US then what does that buy him?  6 months?  A year?  I think it is much, much more likely that Un has risked way more on the summit than the us.  If he doesn't deliver change now, then the people will be much more inclined to revolt.  Un played his trump card (no pun).  I think a coup of the generals is much more likely as a result of them not wanting to get executed by unruly mobs than trying to take out Un to get power.  

[Caracara 41]

Mojo mentioned once that China has a NK royal stashed away (maybe to replace Un on the throne?).  Seems like any coup would have to have chinese support.

[Mole 4331]

I fail to see how changing the status quo makes a coup or any kind of improvement less likely. It's not like they haven't had plenty of time to stage a coup, yet here we are.

Short of restarting the war, change is good, or at least probably wouldn't be bad.

[NotActuallyALonghorn 4976]

13 minutes ago, Caracara said:

Mojo mentioned once that China has a NK royal stashed away (maybe to replace Un on the throne?).  Seems like any coup would have to have chinese support.

Pretty sure that dude was assassinated.

[Mojo Hand 4580]

21 minutes ago, sheeeit said:

Maybe.  It still doesn't make much sense to me.  If the generals were ready to pounce pre-summit and then Un gets some perceived respect from the US then what does that buy him?  6 months?  A year?  I think it is much, much more likely that Un has risked way more on the summit than the us.  If he doesn't deliver change now, then the people will be much more inclined to revolt.  Un played his trump card (no pun).  I think a coup of the generals is much more likely as a result of them not wanting to get executed by unruly mobs than trying to take out Un to get power.  

These things don't work like Rube Goldberg machines, where a chain of events plays out piece by piece.   It needn't be true that "the generals were ready to pounce" in order to conclude that the summit strengthened Kim's position.  Maybe there never would have been a coup.  Maybe there would have.  Nobody can every know.   But from all the we know of Kim and his purges and propaganda and the rest, and from the history of how these kinds of regimes fall from the inside, it's reasonable to conclude that Kim's hold on power depends on the perception of his strength as a leader and support for the direction he is taking internationally, which was bolstered by the summit. Certainly more reasonable than your suggestion that Trump has somehow put him on the clock with the bark-eaters before they revolt.  They'll believe whatever he tells them. 

The other aspect of this that I think will play out is that Russia and China will use the summit as cover to help Kim more, under the premise that he's shown good faith by coming to the table.  I think they're happy to sell to him, don't care about his nukes, and now have an excuse to hook him up. 

[Mojo Hand 4580]

10 minutes ago, NotActuallyALonghorn said:

Pretty sure that dude was assassinated.

That was his dad. 

[Message Board User 12395]

wtf

 

[WhatTheBuck 28779]

40 minutes ago, Mole said:

I fail to see how changing the status quo makes a coup or any kind of improvement less likely. It's not like they haven't had plenty of time to stage a coup, yet here we are.

Short of restarting the war, change is good, or at least probably wouldn't be bad.

What has changed? They still have nukes. They're not going to get rid of their nukes. Did you actually fall for Trump's circus act? How embarrassing for you. 

[Mole 4331]

1 hour ago, WhatTheBuck said:

What has changed? They still have nukes. They're not going to get rid of their nukes. Did you actually fall for Trump's circus act? How embarrassing for you. 

If nothing changed, what's the big deal? Either something happened or it didn't.

[WhatTheBuck 28779]

40 minutes ago, Mole said:

If nothing changed, what's the big deal? Either something happened or it didn't.

Oh, you're just a troll.

[TDunk 590]

41 minutes ago, Mole said:

If nothing changed, what's the big deal? Either something happened or it didn't.

Why not travel over to NK and see for yourself.  

[MaybeACoordinator 8349]

Good article on high-end Nork cuisine...

 

 

 

A Guide to North Korean Food from a Man Who's Been Eating It for 14 YearsHaving visited North Korea nearly 150 times, Simon Cockerell is well-versed in the cuisine of the hermit kingdom. His advice: try the sushi but avoid the clams cooked in gasoline.
 

[Mole 4331]

6 hours ago, WhatTheBuck said:

Oh, you're just a troll.

If that helps you not think critically about what's going on, sure.

[Mole 4331]

To clarify, we're being told that nothing changed while at the same time that Trump's actions made Kim more powerful in North Korea. It's absurd. Either something changed with the summit or it didn't. If nothing changed, then I don't see why we should care. If something changed, short of the war restarting, I don't see how that's a bad thing.

The idea that this was some huge strategic victory for Kim and it's helping keep him in power is insane considering the control he has over North Korea. We've had 65 years of a strategy that gave us people boiling bark and a nuclear North Korea. The only thing the previous strategy succeeded in was keeping the world from blowing up, which is admittedly good. Other than that, I don't see how the previous approach has been good at all. At this point, anything that changes the relationship can't be that bad unless it restarts the war. How can it get worse?

But we can't see past Trump bad (which he is), so this must be bad.

[Mojo Hand 4580]

7 minutes ago, Mole said:

To clarify, we're being told that nothing changed while at the same time that Trump's actions made Kim more powerful in North Korea. It's absurd. Either something changed with the summit or it didn't. If nothing changed, then I don't see why we should care. If something changed, short of the war restarting, I don't see how that's a bad thing.

You're playing semantic games to create a contradiction that doesn't exist.  Point me to one poster or anyone in the media who said those two things with the literalness you ascribe.

[WhatTheBuck 28779]

1 hour ago, Mole said:

If that helps you not think critically about what's going on, sure.

If you were a critical thinker then you would have answered my question. Instead you dodged my question by asking another question. Worse yet, in that question you advanced a contradiction to your original assertion. It was a trifecta of intellectually dishonest trolling.

Go troll someone else. I can't be bothered. 

[Mole 4331]

I guess I'm not being clear and got pulled into a semantic vortex over the word "change" by WhatTheBuck. Our strategy has been such a failure in North Korea - a decades-long humanitarian crisis, an unbelievably oppressive regime, and now nuclear weapons - that I can't imagine Trump's narcissism tour being much worse. Declaring the summit as an internal propaganda victory doesn't resonate with me since everything Kim does internally is propaganda. Dictating our actions based on avoiding creating propaganda for Kim seems like a fool's errand. No matter what we do, Kim will spin it in North Korea as a great victory. Any change in this relationship seems like progress to me.

We're talking past each other, so carry on. 

[Brian Fantana 6685]

That's a lot of words to say absolutely nothing of substance.

[Anastasis 23469]

That's a lot of words to say absolutely nothing of substance.

Board motto.

[sheeeit 129]

21 hours ago, Mojo Hand said:

These things don't work like Rube Goldberg machines, where a chain of events plays out piece by piece.   It needn't be true that "the generals were ready to pounce" in order to conclude that the summit strengthened Kim's position.  Maybe there never would have been a coup.  Maybe there would have.  Nobody can every know.   But from all the we know of Kim and his purges and propaganda and the rest, and from the history of how these kinds of regimes fall from the inside, it's reasonable to conclude that Kim's hold on power depends on the perception of his strength as a leader and support for the direction he is taking internationally, which was bolstered by the summit. Certainly more reasonable than your suggestion that Trump has somehow put him on the clock with the bark-eaters before they revolt.  They'll believe whatever he tells them. 

The other aspect of this that I think will play out is that Russia and China will use the summit as cover to help Kim more, under the premise that he's shown good faith by coming to the table.  I think they're happy to sell to him, don't care about his nukes, and now have an excuse to hook him up. 

We shall see.  My take is that the people of NK are tired of starving.  Un realized that and knew he had to do something.  You guys seem to be suggesting that just because he had a summit with trump that his power is stronger.  I do not see that at all.  His power was supreme before the summit.  I think that it is impossible that the people of NK did not hear the talk that the world would feed them if Un gave up his nukes.  If 6 months from now, Un has done nothing and the people are now dying instead of just starving, then I think his power is much more tenuous.

I think only a naive fool would think that China or Russia or anyone would risk access to the financial behemoth that is the US to trade with NK.  

[retread 2951]

 

[Mojo Hand 4580]

2 hours ago, sheeeit said:

We shall see.  My take is that the people of NK are tired of starving.  Un realized that and knew he had to do something.  You guys seem to be suggesting that just because he had a summit with trump that his power is stronger.  I do not see that at all.  His power was supreme before the summit.  I think that it is impossible that the people of NK did not hear the talk that the world would feed them if Un gave up his nukes.  If 6 months from now, Un has done nothing and the people are now dying instead of just starving, then I think his power is much more tenuous.

I think only a naive fool would think that China or Russia or anyone would risk access to the financial behemoth that is the US to trade with NK.  

Yes, we shall see.  My take is that NK has been enduring the sanctions in pursuit of three goals:  develop nukes, develop and prove the ICBM capabilities to threaten the US, and then leverage that power to get the sanctions lifted while keeping the nuke capability.  NK finished goal 2 by the beginning of this year and has since been pursuing the third.  None of their actions make sense if they are just going to give up the nukes, but they make perfect sense in the context of this strategy.   And I think we'll find out in a couple of months that China and Russia have been undermining the sanctions post-summit and selling to the Norks, with Trump helpless to stop it, and that Kim is more secure than ever after Trump legitimized him as a head of state worthy of all the pomp we gave him.  We'll never know if Kim would have been taken down internally had Trump not done all of this, but we'll look back and think the best strategy would have been to keep the sanctions pressure high, hope for a coup or change of heart, and save the public head-of-state treatment as a reward for major, concrete steps towards denuclearizing. 

I sincerely hope I'm wrong and you're right, and that in six months there has either been major denuclearization steps or the internal revolution you are indicating will happen.  I just don't see it. 

[Pancho 44777]

 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

Who could have possibly foreseen that coming?

[RayDog 682]

If I were pres I would offer to supply 100 nucs each to South Korea and Japan with delivery systems that could reach all of North Korea and for the hell of it Bejing, and put the ball in China's court.

If China still didn't want to act I would make the same offer to Taiwan and start building our own island in the South China Sea.

[SmokeyTheBear 5562]

Guys, Trump took care of the North Korean problem, so chill. We'll back off on giving them a hard time and they promise to continue to do whatever they want. What else do you crying libtards want?

[Nivek 16928]

Is this what winning looks like now?  

[Cacti 191]

3 hours ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

Who could have possibly foreseen that coming?

Evidently, we did.

U.S. Upgrading Korea Missile Defense Even as `War Games' Halted

 

[27-25 2047]

On 6/25/2018 at 2:21 PM, Hugo Stiglitz said:

Lol if you believe this.  No evidence to support they’re denuking, in fact there’s more historical evidence that indicates they ain’t doing shit.

They got everything they wanted and more already.  There is no incentive for them to denuclearize now.

South Korea is also in a worse position if things go south.

I see what you did here.

[FondrenRoad 4378]

3 hours ago, RayDog said:

If I were pres I would offer to supply 100 nucs each to South Korea and Japan with delivery systems that could reach all of North Korea and for the hell of it Bejing, and put the ball in China's court.

If China still didn't want to act I would make the same offer to Taiwan and start building our own island in the South China Sea.

South Korea and Japan don't want nukes.  If they did, they'd make them. They certainly have the technical expertise to do so in a very short amount of time.  So does Taiwan, FWIW.

[DixonHur 11301]

It seems like only yesterday that Trump declared North Korea was no longer a threat...but it was actually 2 whole weeks ago.  My how time flies.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

I hate to say I called this, but I called this.

 

[WhatTheBuck 28779]

You don't hate to say you called this and you're not the only one who called it. 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

All true but it pisses me off how people actually gave Trump credit for that shit knowing damn well we wouldn’t accomplish anything.

[DixonHur 11301]

Yes, but Kim is a 35 year old mastermind...I'm sure Trump will fare better when he meets with Putin.

[4th&Five 41536]

It’s done with as far as Trump is concerned. He got his photo op and admiration from his moron supporters and Fox. That’s all he cared about anyway. 

[Ted Lange 16085]

On 6/26/2018 at 11:39 PM, Pancho Negro said:

 

Winning?

[retread 2951]

I'm sure it's just R&D for the first McDonald's in NK

[WhatTheBuck 28779]

3 hours ago, retread said:

I'm sure it's just R&D for the first McDonald's in NK

Maybe that explains why the new quarter pounders taste like shit.