Glad to hear you guys are holding up alright down there. I read that article a couple days ago where the threat was made and felt a chill run down my spine.
As odd as it may seem to say, given that they are both tyrannical despots, I think the current North Korean leader's father was much more sane than the current one is. Most of the time you can count on leaders of actual countries to at least act in their own best interests. There are a lot of rogue countries that might seek to acquire nuclear weapons, but would never launch them if they got them, because they know if they did, their country would be leveled and they'd hang if they weren't crushed in the radioactive ruins of their palace or whathaveyou first. The current guy just seems unhinged to me, and I worry that that relying on him not to do anything catastrophic isn't enough- he almost certainly has to be disarmed.
My sense is that there will be strategically targeted airstrikes to take out the North Korean nuclear program in the next few weeks. The question is really right now if it's going to be American fighter jets or Chinese fighter jets delivering the payload.
The ideal way would be to have China do it, so as not to make them think we have strategic designs on North Korea and have an endgame of a unified Korea that is essentially South Korea annexing the north and American troops moving up from the DMZ right to the Chinese border. If the Chinese want to disarm North Korea instead of having us do it, that's fine. But somebody needs to do it. If they refuse, we'll have to do it, I'm sure radioing ahead to tell China it's coming so there aren't any accidental incidents with them. Were I President, I would probably be opening conveying to Chinese diplomats that we're fine with them policing North Korea if they want, and we'd even be fine with a pro-Chinese coup in that area and a puppet leader of North Korea (I wouldn't say that publicly, I'd just make sure it was understood by the Chinese). We have to be clear with them that goal isn't to realign the map so that we've expanded our sphere of influence at the expense of one of their fellow communist countries on their border, but just to keep our allies in South Korea, Japan, and Australia, among other places, safe.
The Chinese controlling North Korea would actually be far safer than keeping the current guy in power. The Chinese have plenty of strategic reasons not to want to nuke anyone. I am aware of the North China Sea situation and whatnot, but it's a lesser of two evils kind of thing.
The Chinese are also worried about refugees flooding their borders if North Korea falls, which is understandable, but our concern about them nuking our allies trumps that.
I'm going against type here by favoring military intervention. We liberals usually don't. But I'm not completely a slave to labels. Usually, I think of it the same kind of way I'd think of anything- if they punch us, self-defense is okay, so I (retroactively, I'm not that old) favored WW2 (Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor), the Korean War (Our ally was invaded and a UN Secretary Resolution was passed condemning the invasion- Anyone know why the Soviets didn't veto that resolution? Wikipedia doesn't say and I don't remember), the first Gulf War (circa 1990), and the Afghanistan War (They harbored the terrorists who attacked us on 9-11), but would have or did oppose us entering WW1 (I'll explain that one if anyone really wants me to, but I'm not doing it preemptively- it's a long explanation.), Vietnam (This differs from what happened in Korea in several important ways, which again I'll detail upon request, but otherwise, I'm going to save my fingers some typing
), the Iraq the second time (circa 2003), etc. (Although of course once we're in something, I want our troops to win it, because they're my countrymen and women, but that doesn't mean I have to think the politicians made the right call in sending them in).
And, really, I don't think I'd favor a ground invasion of Korea. But surgical aerial and drone strikes, absolutely.
And, actually, for our international readers, it bares mentioning the US Democrats have historically typically been divided on these issues. Most Republicans have favored military attack historically, Democrats are more 50-50, depending on what the action is. There was only 1 Republican Senator who voted against the Use of Force Resolution in Iraq in the early part of this century (Historical note: That Republican eventually became an independent and later a Democrat), but about half of Democrats voted one way and half voted the other way (Although the caveat there is that most of the half of Democrats that voted to approve use of force later said they were lied to by the Bush White House and wouldn't have approved it had they known what the President knew- they were given false or misleading information. Probably 90% of them or more were against the war eventually. Joe Lieberman being one of the main ones who stuck to being for it- and he became a member of the Connecticut for Lieberman Party [Look it up, that was the ticket he ran for re-election to the Senate on in 2006 after losing a Democratic primary for his own seat.]).
I suppose the US Democratic Party has been a lot like the British Labor Party. We've got our Jeremy Corbyn/Bernie Sanders wing and our Tony Blair/Bill Clinton/Hillary Clinton wing. What we have in common is that we're all left of the Republicans.
It's just a question of degree. It used to be 50% self-described moderates and 50% self-described liberals in polls of voters who identify as Democrats. That is starting to skew to majority liberal (Which is synonymous with left in the US) self-identifiers, because the country in general is becoming more polarized politically (Bush Jr and Trump will do that to a country). Republican voters have 80-90% conservative self-identifiers and growing for a while now, though- they drove most of the moderate candidates out of their party, and they landed in the Democratic Party, or became independents.
