I’m going to take a break from my wall-to-wall election 2016 coverage to talk about one of those very serious issues that were already septic when Obama took office in 2009 and have remained that way throughout his presidency. One of the big ones is Korea, which this president is handling pretty poorly, though perhaps marginally better than his predecessor, who chose to include North Korea in his “Axis of Evil”.
Obama hasn’t gone that far, but with all that’s at stake on the Korean peninsula, it is reckless merely to follow the same path as even some of your more sane predecessors in office. It’s late in the game, but a real effort should be made to defuse this confrontation before someone makes a mistake. Mistakes in Korea can cost hundreds of thousands of lives in a very short time; no policy of either containment or rollback is worth that level of risk.
I raise this now because over the last week, Obama flew some nuclear-capable stealth fighters over South Korea in an obvious demonstration of our willingness to “go there” – this in response to a missile test by Pyongyang. I guess the annual joint exercises we do with South Korea every March is not enough, though the well-rehearsed maneuvers are designed to mock an amphibious invasion of North Korea. With something like 50 U.S. military installations in South Korea, effective operational control of Seoul’s armed forces by the U.S., and plenty of American war planes and troops on the premises, it’s little wonder that North Korea wants a deterrent.
It’s probably wise to recall that the North was bombed to a fare-the-well during the Korean War. They have a living national memory of what it is like to be annihilated. It’s a large measure of what makes them kind of crazy. I know we have a tendency to shrug off other nations’ concerns about our saber-rattling, but in this case we’re dealing with a country that has already been blown up by us once. When we fly nuclear-capable aircraft over the peninsula, the intended threat has some resonance. Their dispute is more with us than with the South. When they go out of their way to get attention, it’s to get OUR attention. Given all that’s at stake, we should talk to them … like, now.
Next week: Scalia and the election.
