Vicious Rants of an Angry Yellow Man

There are many people, including people in government, who thought Kim Jong Il was a stupid mad man. Eccentric and ruthless, yes. But stupid, no. Sure, he inherited power from his father. Sure, he was not as charismatic as his father was. Usually sons of politicians are not as capable as the father. But many of his actions that are deemed crazy in the west are in most cases shrewd moves. By playing up his mad man character, it scares the west into thinking that he may use nuclear weapons and thus they are more likely to negotiate with him and give him aid. As I have written before, dictators like Kim and Hussein are not going to use weapons of mass destruction against the west because they know they would not survive the retaliation. Just like Hussein's chemical and biological weapons, Kim's nukes are just for show and as a means of extortion to get concessions.

Now what is next? Well, nobody knows much about his son Kim Jong Un. Supposedly he was educated outside of the country but I don't know where. But in any case I doubt that he would open up the country. I had high hopes for Assad in Syria when he took over for his father because he was a British trained physician. Surely he would be less despotic than his father. But that turned out not to be true. So it is likely the young Kim will not be much different than his father in term of policies. Even if he is different, I think the old generals in the military would control him, maybe use him as a puppet. But one thing for sure, after a transition period, we should try to engage the North Koreans as quickly as possible. I think trying to isolate them would be a mistake. You always try to keep your enemies close to you so you understand them better. We should try to understand the young Kim as soon as possible. I know China will be trying to do this because the last thing they want is for the regime to collapse, spilling millions of refugees into China.

Finally, I think we really have no great reason to keep thousands of troops in South Korea. The South Koreans are perfectly capable of fighting off a convention attack from the north. And if the north use nukes, we would have to respond with nukes. We can do this from anywhere, including the Pacific fleet. We don't have to have soldiers at the DMZ to use nukes. In fact if the north is crazy enough to use nukes, then having our soldiers there would just add to our casualties. So, we don't need a big base in Korea. Ron Paul is right on about this, we don't have to spread our military all over the world to protect us and our allies.