Looks at Ukraine and the Budapest Memorandum
Hard to argue with Kim here.
Hell, looks at Iran. North Korea got nukes and now their leader is parading his daughter on a tank and preparing her to succeed him. Iran tried to negotiate and their now-leader’s father, wife and children are all dead. Given the crippling sanctions already on Iran, one approach is clearly more successful than the other.
I haven’t seen much evidence that Kim Ju-Ae is being raised as a “successor,” KJU has an elected position. I do think he is preparing her for politics, but it may not be in the capacity of General Secretary of the WPK or anything like that.
I bet Iran will now. They’d be pretty stupid if they didn’t.
Iran has something the DPRK does not, though, Hormuz. It’s essentially an economic nuke, though obviously it isn’t as effective at preventing attack, it seems very effective at flipping the tides without inviting an actual nuke on them in retaliation like MAD doctrine would result in.
It’s sort of one-time-use though. Now that it’s been used, the gulf states are building pipelines to bypass the gulf and vulnerable countries are taking the opportunity to decarbonize. If the straight opened tomorrow, these countries would continue those efforts to reduce their strategic vulnerability. It won’t be as strong of a deterrent the second time around.
Also, a nuke is supposed to deter aggression. It didn’t do that.
It’s not a 1 to 1, and the strait still provides a huge capacity for oil flow that pipelines do not have. Further still, the world is transitioning to solar (at greater and lesser rates), reducing the importance of pipelines anyways.
Removed by mod
Why do you expect the DPRK to collapse? It was doing much worse during the flooding in the late 90s and early 2000s, where famine was rampant. Even Forbes describes their current economy as “booming,” and that support for the government is higher than ever. If they were going to collapse, it would have been in during the aforementioned Arduous March, not anytime soon.
He’s right, nobody will give them up now, thank Mr Trump everyone!
It was George W. Bush that ruined the then blossoming Sunshine Policy, actually, after 9/11. From then on denuclearization has been off the table permanently. Trump meeting KJU during his first term was legitimately the best foreign policy the US has ever had with respect to Korea, which tells you that the bar is all the way down in hell.
Good point
