Let Them Rant

First of all, let me say that it is dismaying to hear some say that the Axis of Evil speech provoked North Korea to go nuclear yet so many say that North Korea’s repeated threats to start World War III or turn Seoul into a sea of fire are just their quirky way of saying “let’s talk.”

There, I feel better.

So what if Pyongyang threatens us? What are they going to do, nuke us?

I really think we can contain them and squeeze them until they collapse. Look at the collection of states of NATO that we had to herd during the Cold War. There combined military might was never enough to halt a conventional invasion by the Soviets. Even with our aid, only during the 1980s did our conventional capabilities provide the edge to probably defeat them. And the Soviets had industrial capacity and thousands of nuclear weapons to back their threats. What do we face on the Korean peninsula? A broken state whose military has one shot at attacking a far stronger South Korea. We must work with one state that matters to organize the defense of the south—South Korea itself. And our threat may gain a handful of missiles with nukes. Plus we will have effective missile defenses in time. There are also powerful states in the region with every reason to oppose North Korean nukes regardless of what they think of us. As an added bonus, we don't even need to keep our troops as hostages to our intervention by keeping them on the front line facing the North Koreans since South Korea can hold the line. Will North Korea really launch a war to protest our sanctions?

We’ve faced worse threats. Are we not the nation that went “toe to toe with the Russkies” (with thanks to Slim Pickens) and broke them? We easily forget those days but North Korea really is a blast from the past, its Stalinist rhetoric unchanged from the days when they learned at the feet of Stalin himself. We can do it again against this pipsqueak tyrant.

Contain him. Squeeze him. And make sure he knows we will obliterate every damn bunker he has so that he knows he cannot burrow deep enough to escape nuclear retribution.

His thug regime will collapse if we push it.