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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (56900)	11/13/2002 12:14:21 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Here is the reason we are having a tough time solving the North Korea problem. Seems South Korea just wants to appease. WSJ.com I'm not sure they are wrong in this case. This is a hostage situation where Kim Jong Il is holding a very big gun to the head of an entire country. The difference from Iraq is, we don't know how reckless or aggressive he is -- he has never attacked anyone so far (With Saddam, we do know). Also, he is broke, and must answer to his Chinese patrons, who are probably not best pleased to learn that he has nukes. So "talking him down" might work. Since he already has nukes, we don't have much to lose by trying.

To: LindyBill who wrote (56900)	11/13/2002 11:34:23 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi LindyBill; Re the South Korean "appeasement" policy towards North Korea, despite the nuclear weapons possessed by North Korea. I think the comparison to the US response to Cuban missile crisis misses the fact that the South Koreans fully expect to see the Koreas united, and they have no doubt that the capital will be Seoul. They undoubtedly feel that it's just a matter of time. Also, the South Korean failure to feel great fear is compatible with my analysis of nuclear weapons as being primarily weapons of defense, not offense. If North Korea used them on South Korea, even in threat, we'd help South Korea push over the North Korean regime. The neoconservatives are driven to great extremes of intellectual agility in their explanation for the lack of concern in countries that are neighbors of WMD possessors, both Iraq and North Korea. The result is a foreign policy that implicitly assumes that most of our allies are stupid or irrational, and that only our administration is intelligent and brave. Just on statistical grounds, this is unlikely to be true. -- Carl