Skip to main content

Possibly President Obama's first foreign policy challenge will come from...

....North Korea?

And it's not nukes, but a sudden television appearance by a North Korean army spokesman threatening to annihilate the South:

SEOUL, Jan 17 (Reuters) - North Korea's army said on Saturday it would assume an "all-out confrontational posture" against the South and wipe out the conservative government in Seoul for refusing to cooperate with them.

Ties across the heavily-armed border between the two Koreas have turned icy since President Lee Myung-bak came to office last year on a promise to get tough on his communist neighbour after 10 years of liberal leaders' efforts to engage Pyongyang.

"Now that traitor Lee Myung Bak and his group opted for confrontation, denying national reconciliation and cooperation, backed by foreign forces, our revolutionary armed forces are compelled to take an all-out confrontational posture to shatter them," the North's army spokesman said.

The spokesman said Lee and his "puppet military warhawks" have driven "our revolutionary armed forces to take a strong military retaliatory step to wipe them out," in comments carried by the official KCNA news agency....

The army spokesman, appearing in full uniform on North Korea's state television, said provocations by the South's military including naval intrusions have cross the "danger line" and it could "no longer remain an onlooker to them." (Reporting by Jack Kim)


Here's the problem: from the Koreas to the Indian subcontinent to the Caucasus to the Middle East to Sub-saharan Africa to the northern coast of South America, the last eight years have left us in a far more de-stabilized world.

You can lay any amount of that at the feet of Dubya (although Russian expansionism, the India-Pakistani embitterment, and other regional conflicts have far less to do with the US than we'd like to think), but the fact of the matter is that we now have to look forward.

Here's hoping that beyond responding to immediate crises (which he has to do), President Obama and Secretary Clinton are actually developing a workable doctrine for when and where to deploy military forces.

Unfortunately, one of the reasons we're where we are is that the last President who actually did this (believe it or not) was Richard Nixon.
Labels:

Comments

Waldo Lydecker's Journal said…
I not only believe it, I remember it. Nixon was crazy like a fox, and he made the Communists feel like drag racers wondering if he'd veer off at the last minute or smack them head-on. They always blinked. Sometimes crazy works.
January 18, 2009 at 8:12 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here:  chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society  [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.”   The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...
44 comments
Read more

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?
1 comment
Read more

New Warfare: I started my posts with a discussion.....

.....on Unrestricted warfare . The US Air force Institute for National Security Studies have developed a reasonable systems approach to deter non-state violent actors who they label as NSVA's. It is an exceptionally important report if we want to deter violent extremism and other potential violent actors that could threaten this nation and its security. It is THE report our political officials should be listening to to shape policy so that we do not become excessive in using force against those who do not agree with policy and dispute it with reason and normal non-violent civil disobedience. This report, should be carefully read by everyone really concerned with protecting civil liberties while deterring violent terrorism and I recommend if you are a professional you send your recommendations via e-mail at the link above so that either 1.) additional safeguards to civil liberties are included, or 2.) additional viable strategies can be used. Finally, one can only hope that politici...
1 comment
Read more