Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
All governments need an “enemy” to frighten the peasantry with so as to maintain the illusion of necessity and legitimacy. When I was a kid, the USA had an easy time of this; we had the Soviet Union to fear – a country larger than the USA with a state-of-the-art military. They had an arsenal of powerful nuclear weapons mounted atop Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) that could reach deep into America’s heartland. Their conventional military forces – save for the navy – matched ours in terms of capability and technology. In short, they were a real threat.
Then, they were gone. Within two years of the Soviet Union’s inevitable collapse, the USA had scrambled to convince us that Saddam Hussein was the world’s new bad guy. Twenty-five years of nearly non-stop military involvement in the region later, and the US military has defeated Saddam’s Iraq only to have ISIS step into the power vacuum left by his ouster. The problem with ISIS trying to be the new boogeyman is that they don’t have a country, really, nor an air force or navy. They’re not a threat to the USA or her citizens, just to the business interests of our oligarchs, which is why we’re still mucking about over there.
So, to remedy this lack of a credible adversary, the Trump regime seems to have focused on North Korea in recent weeks and the hermit kingdom figures to be a key topic of discussion at an upcoming meeting between President Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, who will meet later this week at one of Trump’s resorts in Florida.
As a preview of the upcoming ginning-up of North Korea’s threat-level, a U.S. official anonymously made some dire-sounding remarks that were reported by Yahoo News.
“’The clock has now run out, and all options are on the table for us,’ the official told reporters at a briefing held on condition that he not be identified by name,” wrote Oliver Knox, Yahoo’s Chief Washington Correspondent.
According to the same article, North Korea responded to the reporting of those remarks by firing another missile into the sea off of its own coast – where most of its “long range” missiles tend to end up – according to South Korean officials.
The Trump regime is hoping they’ll be able to pressure Xi Jinping into agreeing to take steps to rein in their neighbor and benefactor’s increasingly belligerent behavior. Of course, Trump has done little else but antagonize China and its government throughout the campaign, so, it’ll be interesting to see how little Xi Jinping will be interested in helping.
“’I think we have to be clear-eyed as to how far China will go and not get overly optimistic as to how far they’ll go,’ Tillerson told a January 11 hearing on his confirmation as secretary of state.
‘If China is not going to comply with … U.N. sanctions, then it’s appropriate for us — for the United States — to consider actions to compel them to comply,’ he added,” Knox quoted Trump’s Secretary of State Rex Tillerson as saying.
“Compel them to comply?” Last I checked, the USA didn’t have much leverage over China, certainly not enough to compel that nation to do something it considers inherently risky, like potentially destabilizing their neighbor and triggering a collapse of his regime and, most importantly, the attendant wave of refugees fleeing to China.
Knox also quoted a tweet by then-President-Elect-Trump that doesn’t bode well for civil discussions that end in China pledging any sort of support.
“’China has been taking out massive amounts of money & wealth from the U.S. in totally one-sided trade, but won’t help with North Korea. Nice!’“ Knox quoted Trump via Twitter.
It is clear that the Trump regime is determined to make North Korea into a credible threat that justifies looting the State Department to fund a massive increase to the Defense Department’s budget and the narrative they’re going to use to sell this story is North Korea’s “nuclear capability.” This is despite the fact that North Korea really doesn’t have a nuclear capability. They’ve created explosive atomic devices, but we don’t have hard data on the designs used. A simple “gun-type” bomb is easy to construct, but they tend to be massive and won’t fit atop an ICBM. “Implosion type” atomic bombs are much more sophisticated and difficult to build, but can be made small enough to fit atop a missile. We know North Korea’s missile technology is sufficient to put a satellite into orbit, but we don’t know for sure if they’ve a missile capable of reaching any part of the USA or a warhead small enough to fit atop such a rocket.
As anemic as North Korea’s nuclear capability is, their ability to threaten the USA with conventional military force is just laughable. According to GlobalFirepower – a website that analyzes the military capability of the world’s various nations using unclassified data from CIA and other sources – the only thing North Korea’s military has in its favor is manpower, with an estimated 700,000 active frontline personnel and 4.5 million active reservists. Those soldiers are supported by an estimated some 16,000 tanks, troop carriers and artillery pieces. In the air, the North Koreans have a total of 458 fighter/interceptor aircraft and 20 attack helicopters.
So, they’re definitely well-prepared to play a home game.
Let’s look at their Navy. According to GlobalFirepower, the North Korean navy consists of three frigates, two corvettes (large costal defense ships), seventy submarines, 211 coastal defense craft and 23 mine-tenders. Clearly, they have no means to bring an invasion force to the shores of the USA that wouldn’t be intercepted and sunk nearly immediately upon departure. With conventional forces alone, the North Koreans are simply no threat, at all, to the USA. The only remotely credible threat they’re capable of making is that of a pre-emptive nuclear strike.
The North Koreans did conduct a successful test of a submarine-launched ballistic missile back in August with a potential maximum range of 620 miles. This technology, combined with North Korea’s estimated 70 submarines, could be potential threat if, in fact, the DPRK has figured out how to mount a nuclear warhead on them.
So, North Korea might have the capability of launching a nuclear first-strike against the USA. Of course, so too do a lot of nations, not all of them always terribly friendly to the USA. Yet, no one has ever dared use those monstrous things since the USA used them against Japan to end WWII.
The prevailing theory is that the concept of Mutually-Assured Destruction (MAD) was what kept the Cold War from turning thermonuclear-hot – both the USA and USSR knew they couldn’t hit each other hard enough to knock out the other’s ability to retaliate in kind. For all the efforts to make the entire Kim dynasty appear “crazy” and “unhinged,” chances are good Kim Jong Un isn’t a terribly stupid person. As such, he must know that if he were to hit the USA with every single nuclear weapon he could build in his entire lifetime, said lifetime would be over within 20 minutes or so after giving the launch command.
And that’s the rub, our government is working hard to convince us that North Korea wants to attack us and could at any time, and their capacity to do so is steadily growing, but no one seems interested in asking “why would they?”
Say North Korea manages to limp a rocket over to the West Coast and nukes part of California. So what? It’s not as though there’s going to be an invasion force following behind, ready to occupy the decimated radioactive wasteland they’ve just created. Indeed, such an attack would be nothing more than a massive act of atomic vandalism.
And, what would North Korea even gain? Before the missile even reached its target, they’d find themselves disowned by China – their major supplier of food and fuel. The USA’s retaliation likely wouldn’t be nuclear, given the proximity of South Korea and China, but it wouldn’t be any less cataclysmic for the North Koreans. At a mere 46,541 square miles, the U.S. Air Force could pock-mark the entire nation with conventional bomb-craters within a few weeks after sweeping aside their anemic air force with its own air-superiority fighters.
As I said at the outset, governments need enemies. Ever since 1953, the USA has played that role to the Kim dynasty of North Korea. Indeed, sixty-three-some years and three dictators later and the impending reappearance of the Americans north of the 38th parallel has been the glue that’s held the official narrative of North Korean government and society together.
The irony here is that we Americans like to consider North Korea backward, primitive and ignorant for the way they portray us while our own “leaders” lie to us and exaggerate the threat the other poses, just as the Kims have done to North Korea’s peasantry for generations now. The sad difference is that the average North Korean is exposed to nothing but government propaganda that reinforces the absurd narrative of imminent American attack, and therefore cannot be blamed, at least not completely, for believing such a lie. Americans, on the other hand, theoretically should know better; yet, there will doubtlessly be millions of them who fall for the Trump regime’s scare-tactics in the weeks and months to come.
Don’t be one of them.
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