In the last couple of weeks we have been greeted with news that North Korea has developed an intercontinental ballistic missile that can reach out and touch US 10,000 miles away. And that they have probably miniaturized a nuclear warhead to fit to one. The POTUS has threatened them, that if they threaten us, there will be “fire and fury” the likes of which the world has never seen. Both sides have abrogated the Armistice, and North Korea says it is no longer bound by the Armistice.
That means we are at war.
Hold on there.
I suppose it is worth noting that the NorKs are famous for rattling sabers they don’t exactly have, with a history of parading models of arms instead of working arms being on parade – but still. The rhetoric is at a recent high just now, and we have heads of State on both sides pointing fingers in each others’ face and saying the other needs to tone it down or else. But the situation recently changed in a different way than anyone seems to have expected.
Trump.
President Trump has got the Chinese to agree to sanctions against North Korea (along with literally everyone else on the U.N.S.C.) and that is big league. The best case scenario I think is the Chinese government is convinced to lean hard enough on North Korea to give up either its nuclear program or its dictator, or both. Preferably both. I hope it doesn’t devolve into war but aside from a limited number of possibly-pretty-bad missile strikes from submarines and ships, I like to think it would be a lopsided conflict and it would last as long as the USA wanted it to last. I think I don’t flatter myself too much when I think we could pave the entire peninsula in rubble. I don’t put it beyond the crazy in North Korea to have dug a bunker for himself deep enough that we couldn’t blow it up, but we can surely deprive him of all his military might in a relative hurry.
We’ll see. Time will tell that tale.
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Also, relatively unreported-upon in the USA press, a civil war is breaking out in Venezuela. They have finally reached the logical end-stage of pure Socialism and the society has collapsed. The people are starving and the military is apparently waking up to reality. A “former” Lieutenant led a small strike force into a military base in Valencia and stole some arms. Half his force was captured or killed, which is a terrible ratio but maybe his luck turns better in the future.
It has repeatedly happened, that full-scale warfare followed from a few guys with a few guns, who managed to steal some more guns from the government they were trying to overthrow. Will this armed rebellion in Venezuela result in the overthrow of Maduro, or will it be crushed?
We’ll see. Time will tell that tale, too. But you probably won’t hear much about it in the USAmerican news.
