O.K., fun if fun, but playground time is over. The petulant Cheeto man-child finally got to play with his toys, he pouted and yelled, and some shit went boom!. But that’s enough fun for one day, time for your nappy-poo Donnie-boy, while your nannies clean up the mess.
Well, Syria was fun, but it’s kind of a one trick pony unless Trump wants to go to Congress to do more, and good luck there. So now, it’s off to North Korea, cuz you know, reasons and stuff. But this is not the way to do it. Trump has asked for a list of options for dealing with North Korea, since he’s on a roll, and besides, Obama didn’t have the balls for it, and in response to his request, the military has provided him with a list of options. If the reports of the options are true, suddenly those dehydrated survival bunker meals are not looking so silly.
First, putting tactical nukes back in South Korea. Great idea! Nothing will buckle Kim Jong Un’s knees quicker than the thought of nukes 1 hour or less away from Pyongyang. And if they can reach Pyongyang, then they can reach China, which should make them sleep easy at night.
Kill Un or his key military people. Excuse me, am I delusional, or didn’t that high ranking North Korean defector just tell Lester Holt and the rest of the world last week that Kim Jong Un would lash out to to achieve a fiery Valhalla if he felt that either his regime or himself personally was threatened? Nobody else in North Korea may be able to get Sesame Street, but I think Un may just get wind of this.
Use South Koreans soldiers and US special forces to infiltrate North Korea and sabotage their missile efforts. South Korean soldiers maybe, if they could drop a few pounds and fake true believer stares and scowls, but US special forces? That would be like sending Marines in to infiltrate ISIS. No insult intended, but they kind of don’t look anything alike!
There’s a reason why no US President, nor the rest of the sane world has been able to solve the North Korea problem. It’s hard to deal with an insular country, with a slavish, brainwashed population who wants to divorce itself from the world, but still interfere with it. Think of it as a kind of a Jonestown writ large. But, there is a way. The problem is that it isn’t flashy, and it will take time.
Remember how we won the Cold War and brought down the Berlin wall? We didn’t do it by nuking Moscow, in fact we never fired a shot. We won it with information, and we won it with ideas. Information exploded over the world stage, and we used it. Radio Free Europe, television, newspapers and magazines. Trusted Russians and citizens from other satellite countries were allowed to travel to “the west” and return, and they brought with them western products (sometimes smuggled) and stories of the riches and freedom “over there”. The poor slobs stuck in the Communist Paradise wanted theirs, and eventually they got it.
The same principle is being used again to try to free North Korea, and it’s going almost completely unreported. A group of North Korean defectors has set up and is trying to expand a smuggling network into North Korea. The contraband? Information and ideas. According to a REPORT on PBS.com from back in December;
In recent years, some of these defectors, who now live in South Korea, have sought to undermine the grip of the Kim regime on North Korean citizens. They transfer media, including American movies and TV shows, to USB drives and smuggle them to North Korea, where they are passed around to citizens who have no access to the internet or any information outside the country.
This is the same formula that worked on the Soviet Union, and it can work here. It will take longer for a couple of reasons. First, North Korea is such an insular country that very little, almost no citizen travel outside its borders is permitted, and the government agents that are allowed to travel keep their mouths shut. Second, there is no television reception, or radio coverage other than state tv and radio allowed, western print materials are forbidden, so the only channel is the pirated materials that the defectors are sneaking in, and there’s a limit in how much they can smuggle in at any one time. But we know it’s working, because of the increasing demand for the information on the greater world outside the borders of North Korea. But the government is aware of this, and they know it’s a serious threat, and are on its their legs to try to stop it. According to an expert interviewed for the article;
The government has been able to sustain their regime over the past seven decades based on the history of their government, their country, and [the] world that they created and were able to distribute. Their cult and personality-based country, their religion-like political system surrounding the Kim family — all of that is predicated on this history that they have created.
And so the fact that the citizens are now exposed to these lies is very threatening to the North Korean regime. Because without the citizens believing in the state’s history and reality that they have fabricated, they don’t have anything to base their internal system on. And so basically an informed citizenry is fundamentally antithetical to the foundation that the North Korean regime would like to maintain in order to keep power in the Kim family’s hands.
And it appears that there is time to let this work. In response to North Korea’s newest launches, most experts seem to feel that while North Korea may currently be a legitimate threat to both
South Korea and Japan with traditional warhead ballistic missiles, they are at least 5 years way from being able to miniaturize a nuclear warhead and develop a missile with the range to strike directly in the US.
So, here’s an option for President Tiny Thumbs and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to consider. Think about taking some of that $70M you just wasted on blowing up some gas pumps and storage sheds in Syria to no tangible effect and funnel it to the defectors in South Korea to increase their production of materials to smuggle in. You want to “infiltrate” North Korea and sabotage their efforts? Help the dissidents to expand and streamline their smuggling operation, get more information in quicker, apparently the people in North Korea are starving for it. It won’t be quick, and there won’t be any Hollywood technicolor special effects, but it’ll get the job done. Remember the Soviet Union.