If a North Korean nuclear attack happened

[Dill]

(08-07-2017, 12:13 PM)Matt_Crimson Wrote: If North Korea were to successfully carry out a nuclear strike against the United States would you consider such an event to be a failure of the Trump administration or administrations past? Or perhaps both?

In addition to this do you think the US would need to change the way it handles verbal threats of attacks from foreign enemies going forward that abondons the peaceful use of sanctions? In other words would all bets be off for you in the aftermath of a North Korean attack?

Every country, every situation, is different--especially when compared to NK.  There is no "one way" to handle threats of verbal attacks.

We need to not think that we can control everything, that "losing China," or "losing Korea" is always some administration's fault.
There is nothing the US could have done to prevent the creation of NK, short of continuing WWII against our ally, the Soviet Union. Serious diplomacy over the last 30 years MIGHT have prevented the current crisis. We don't know for sure. Also, a failure of which ever administration led to this impasse, if one did fail, is also on the American voters who chose presidents unskilled in government and diplomacy.  We are feeling that bigtime now.

How, exactly, does the US handle verbal threats of attacks? NK was responsive to talks and sanctions during the 90s, but Clinton blew a peaceful nuclear power agreement stalling for regime change. Bush would not talk to "evil," so NK had no reason to trust our "diplomacy."  The IRaq invasion showed the US' willingness to invade whomever we want based upon fabricated intel, never mind that Iraq was already perfectly contained and adhering to post Gulf War agreements. Libya scrapped its nuke program to comply with US wishes--and the US led a bombing campaign against Gaddafi.  The clear lesson from all this is that the US "handles" threats differently from president to president, that the only way you could be SURE the US could not launch a ground invasion is to have nukes.

I don't see any scenario in which NK carries out a nuclear attack on the US without extreme provocation, like a land invasion by the US.

Their leader and ours are both unstable, given to reckless threats. It is not clear how well their advisors can control their actions. Think of the Cuban missile crisis without Kennedy or Khrushchev.  Kim Jong Un may actually have a better sense of geopolitcs, understanding that China and Russia will not sit by while the US rains "fire and fury and, frankly, power" on their doorstep. That is a two edged sword of course. They don't want Kim bringing trouble to their doorstep.

Which is why diplomacy plus sanctions are the best option right now. Kim can't strike everyone sanctioning his regime, and sanctions would bring it down more certainly than military attacks.  The US lacks leadership with any international stature right now. The question is whether people around the current president can manage the crisis. Sad that generals are the only reasonably competent diplomats on the Trump team.