North Korea What to do?

[Dill]

(06-29-2017, 04:34 PM)Benton Wrote: Japan is unique given our WWII history and the agreements that were made in the years after. Many (all?) of which are still honored between the two countries. Our military presence there is not the same as our presence in South Korea or Niger or Australia. 

Taiwan, I'll admit, I don't stay very well versed of. I would help them join the United Nations and — similar to NATO with Russia — encourage Taiwan and other nations concerned about an aggressive China to form an ally agreement. Our formal agreement with Taiwan ended in the 80s (if I'm remembering right, I was in elementary school then).

And, yes, if North attacks South, the US should stay out of it, by and large. Help those displaced by fighting, offer assistance to victims. But we don't have to fight every fight in the name of stopping one despot or another. We need to encourage more of a unified effort through allies and potential allies and less of us taking on the role of trying to scare everyone into getting along. 

What ended in 1979 was our formal recognition of Taiwan as government of "China."

To help Taiwan join the United Nations, we'd have to violate our current one-China policy and recognize them as a separate nation. That might mean a serious break in diplomatic relations with China; they have broken with the 19 countries that recognize Taiwan as the legitimate government of China. That is their stated policy. As I mentioned in a thread on this subject some months ago, China is a great help to us in many ways, especially in Central Asia. We might not have had the Iran deal without them. Taiwan's power in this respect is nil.

We have Mutual Defense Agreement with South Korea and one with Taiwan, both signed in the same year. How seriously will people take our agreements if we give South Korea to NK and China? If I were Japan, I would be very nervous.

I think that abandoning SK would likely force all US allies in the region either 1) to develop a separate set of mutual defense alliances (that you suggest above), likely leading to nuclear proliferation (Taiwan and Japan's only chance of real deterrence), and before that offering many incentives for Chinese boundary-testing, or 2) to accept Chinese hegemony in the region.  The result would be the economies of SK, Japan, and Taiwan (and perhaps Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia?) would align with interests of Beijing rather than ours, as they do now.

You are right that we cannot police every dictator who pops up in the world (though I am not sure we have ever really done that anywhere our interests were not involved.) We are still paying for the Iraq blunder in so many ways, but I worry about abandoning the system of alliances and bases set up after WWII. The US presence deters state violence and invasions in many places, South Korea being one. I don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. The result will be the kind of world that devolves into WWIII as various regional wars ignite and link together.