Look, I understand that the South Koreans may have an understandable desire to avoid paying the price for American and Japanese policies that try to crumble North Korea. Seoul is close to the border and vulnerable to non-nuclear weapons. They can reasonably ask why North Korea with nuclear missiles capable of reaching Japan or America is any more threatening to them than the current situation?
But by the same token, we have an understandable desire to keep North Korea from targetting our cities. Just because Seoul is already targetted doesn't mean we want Tokyo or Seattle to be targets of the Pillsbury Nuke Boy.
This divergence may very well threaten the basis for our alliance with South Korea if Seoul's fear of North Korea prevents South Korea from effectively resisting North Korean pressure and threats:
I've come to the conclusion that our South Korean alliance is in peril in the long run. I'd thought it was based on cold calculations over differing American/Japanese goals and South Korean goals. That is, Japan and America worry about nukes since this is a new threat to us. South Korea doesn't worry about nukes since the ability to nuke Seoul is a destruction not too different from the destruction that an invasion could have inflicted the last fifty years. South Korea would rather risk Tokyo or Seattle (or Guam) than risk even a conventional invasion by the North Koreans in order to eliminate the North Korean nuclear arsenal. As disturbing as this divergence is, I figured we could probably reconcile our goals. At the worst, North Korean insanity would eventually provide a common--or at least overlapping--threat perception.
But it may be worse than mere tactics and vulnerabilities. I have little faith that the North and South can unite in a happy kumbaya celebration of Korean-ness. And if the South doesn't take the threat seriously, reunification may be on Pyongyang's terms after all. You need the will to fight and not just the weapons. Will the South fight their "brothers" in the North if the balloon goes up?
North Korea is already world-class nutty. The South Koreans might have gone completely bonkers as well. Our North Korean problem might well become a Korean problem, and I don't know what we can do about it.
Well, via Instapundit, a sign of South Korea going completely bonkers:
So it has come to this: it is no longer legal to criticize the human rights record of North Korea in Seoul, South Korea.
Stark raving bonkers, I tell you. Our State Department needs to do some serious work to shore up our South Korean alliance.
