Interesting
i’d check out jordan chariton when it comes to the flint crisis. he’s been covering it almost exclusively for 2 years - i met him in a jail cell in STL after the jason stockley verdict.
didn’t kevin drum support the iraq war? motherjones has been getting worse for years now
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I admit total ignorance on the subject tbh. I don’t really read MJ at all, shoulda just posted the nytimes article he’s blogging about
Too much power in the region. We cant. We dont have an israel and saudi arabia there
MJ kept the same hippie boomer readership and never really got to “rebrand” for youths
Japan and South Korea are practically our client states. that doesn’t mention quite a few more nearby that I’m missing, but the phillipines and malaysia are two more
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Israel and Saudi Arabia do jack shit compared to the 8 boats/2 carriers we have patrolling the area
This is pretty dated. China has a grip on most of our allies in East Asia now. There is no country like China in the middle east that requires the existance of Iran. NK and its current regime has to exist for China. I dont think this dynamic exists in the middle east
That whole having nukes thing matters
Pakistan, India, Israel are the top 3 likelihoods of using nuclear option
Exactly. We stand on the opposite side of this in East Asia
Nobody will use nukes in Asia. There’s absolutely no point in using them unless you’re North Korea, and even in that case the entire Juche hegemony could very easily be dispatched without much issue.
The only reason there’s any aid to NK is that they will probably be our next big source of cheap labor. Once the international community decides it’s economically good sense to install a different leader, it would happen, but right now it’s even easier to just have Jong-un get bribed by China or talk real estate with Trump in exchange for him feeding his subjects
respectfully disagree
the power structure is ~30 people
doesnt mean there wouldnt be much issue when those 30 people stand in the way of US control of East Asia vs the other super power.
of course the US can take out 30 people. doesnt mean it will happen without issues.
to put it in context “much issue” would be the 300k military infighting deaths compared to the millions of them dying from starvation. I do agree with you that it owuld me really messy installing a new regime there afterwards without a cooperative china
I think it would be far far worse than that. We would lose more than we would gain.
i think China is a relative paper tiger but not compeltely. they are contained quite well by Japan/USA, even India to some extent in the region. they have Big National problems. For instance their internal security forces are larger than the army.
the OBOR initiative could solve their problems though. we’ll see if it works. i dont foresee major conflict in the future, but you cant actually foresee such things so who knows.
russia is literally a nonfactor though that im sure of. they dont actually have a population under 18
why are we discussing hundreds of thousands of civilian lives like pawns on a little chessboard
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The Chinese paper tiger thing is overdone. No shit they are relatively weak and have problems, but it is still a force that doesnt have an equivalent in the middle east. I think this makes regime change pretty much impossible