SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the what-a-difference-a-few-weeks-make dept.
Two bits of news from Asia, widely covered elsewhere. However, are we beginning to see a peace dividend as a result of the thawing in relationships between North and South Korea?
American prisoners held in North Korea on their way home after Pompeo visit, Trump says
"Three American prisoners held in North Korea have been released and are en route to the U.S. after a surprise diplomatic mission by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, President Trump announced Wednesday. " foxnews.com/politics/2018/05/09/american-prisoners-held-in-north-korea-on-their-way-home-after-pompeo-visit-trump-says.html
[Ed Note: They should be back in the US by now although I have not seen any direct reporting of this at the time of editing this story. Anyway, welcome back guys!]
Update: North Korea summit: Trump greets freed US detainees
China, Japan, South Korea open three-way summit
"China, South Korea and Japan have begun their first trilateral summit in more than two years.
[...] They are expected to take up the recent flurry of developments on the Korean peninsula. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un met Moon on April 27 and Chinese President Xi Jinping earlier this week.
Abe said he hopes North Korea will give up its nuclear weapons in a complete and irreversible way.
Li said China is willing to work with Japan and South Korea to maintain regional stability.
The three-way summit is supposed to happen annually, but hasn't been held since November 2015 because of tense relations between Japan and China." foxnews.com/world/2018/05/08/latest-china-japan-south-korea-open-three-way-summit.html
(Score: -1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 10 2018, @01:34PM (31 children)
Don't be mentioning that Trump might have pushed North Korea towards peace with his bellicose rhetoric. That will make our snowflake millennials' heads explode. They need to keep their righteous indignation anger peaked. After all, our Nobel Peace Prize president only managed to get Jack Shit from North Korea.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by Gaaark on Thursday May 10 2018, @01:42PM
My thoughts exactly: Obama won because.......
Trump should win as much as Obama.
And THAT isn't really saying much.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 10 2018, @01:49PM (1 child)
What have you got against righteous indignation?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Righteous_indignation [wikipedia.org]
"In some Christian doctrines, righteous anger is considered the only form of anger which is not sinful, e.g., when Jesus drove the money lenders out of the temple (Gospel of Matthew 21)."
My prediction? Trump will grandstand, but after a few years (possibly after the next US presidential election) it will become clear that nothing really changed except that the USA wasted some more money in Asia. Little Kim has all his skin in this game--for the long haul. Trump not so much.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 10 2018, @08:55PM
My prediction: Kim will get to keep his nukes, and Trump will get to build golf courses in North Korea. A win-win situation!
(Score: 3, Touché) by isostatic on Thursday May 10 2018, @01:52PM (7 children)
So your argument is that Trump played a game of chicken, and that forced China to step in and push for a return to more cordial relations not seen since 2010ish?
(Score: 3, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Thursday May 10 2018, @05:56PM (6 children)
Richard Nixon pulled that one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory [wikipedia.org]
It's dangerous as hell. What do you do if the adversaries call the bluff? Back down or double down? What if the adversaries keep pushing until the only choice is "put up or shut up"? The scariest part is that with all the blustering and lying, a fatal misunderstanding would be all too easy to make.
Another instructive bit of history is the insecure manner of the George W. Bush administration. They knew they had a bunch of posers among them, such as "heck of a job Brownie". Even the Dunning-Kruger effect, strong though it was among the dimmest witted of them (such as George Deutsch), wasn't enough for them to feel like they could do the job. They feared they would not be taken seriously, were very touchy about that, and reacted by doing all kinds of damage of which the biggest was the 2003 War in Iraq. The way Rumsfeld ran that show is revealing. He wouldn't listen to cautionary notes that he was asking for too much, kept insisting he was right and the military could do more with less. He's the kind of asshole who would completely overlook the fact that Iraq fell in a stunningly short "shock and awe" time of just 3 weeks, fast enough to make the German blitzkrieg of Poland in 1939 look a bit slow by comparison, grumbling that the military was too slow. Rummy got away with his audacious shorts during the invasion, but it blew up on him during the occupation, when he insisted 100,000 troops was enough to occupy all of Iraq in the face of advice that it would take 500,000. Even after that, they were still breast beating and needed to be reassured that the world did indeed believe that if they wanted to, they would go to war again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 10 2018, @06:30PM (5 children)
The USA is uniquely capable of maintaining a high-functioning economy without outside help. We have significant imports and exports in an absolute sense, but relative to our economy they are not so big. Most nations have a much stronger need for imports and/or exports. We are a highly diversified economy. From oil to computer chips, we do it all. China isn't like that. China would be in deep trouble without us.
We're pretty damn good at war too. There are only 2 potential adversaries, Russia and China, that would give our war machine a case of mild indigestion. Everybody else is trivial to mow down.
The alternative to what you claim is "madman theory" is certain failure. Obama couldn't negotiate worth a damn because every opponent knew his cards.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday May 10 2018, @06:43PM
The US has lots of fabless semiconductor firms but not many fabs
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by isostatic on Thursday May 10 2018, @08:07PM (3 children)
We're pretty damn good at war too. There are only 2 potential adversaries, Russia and China, that would give our war machine a case of mild indigestion. Everybody else is trivial to mow down.
India, Pakistan, North Korea, UK, France, Israel all have nukes. That's somewhat more than a 'case of mild indigestion'.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday May 11 2018, @12:10AM (2 children)
Some people are under the delusion that they are likely to survive an all-out nuclear war. They are very wrong about that.
Even with, say, India and Pakistan going at it, they have enough firepower to cause nuclear winter, which interrupts everybody's food supplies, which means we're all likely to be dead. And no, you are not likely to have access to a shelter sufficiently supplied to keep you alive, and if you do have access to such a shelter you can be pretty well guaranteed to be attacked by at least a few thousand of the desperate people that don't have anywhere to go and nothing to lose by trying.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Friday May 11 2018, @12:58PM (1 child)
And even if you had such a shelter, and it was well defended or remote that nobody would get there, what kind of life would that be?
Forget the nuclear winter, just a dozen nukes on the eastern seaboard would cause a massive change in lifestyle for the U.S.
You don't win a nuclear war, at most you lose less than the other site.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday May 11 2018, @06:44PM
Part of my point is that the US doesn't even need to get close to being hit in order for nuclear war to be a big problem for USAians. As another example, if Israel nuked Iran into the ground and nobody retaliated, that would also do enough to trigger serious problems for everybody else.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by quietus on Thursday May 10 2018, @01:56PM
Let's see which lessons we can take away here.
Congrats, you are now a valid member of the nuclear anti-proliferation community!
(Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Thursday May 10 2018, @01:57PM (9 children)
Trump is a liar [bloomberg.com], and so is Rocket Man.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/991843153953964033 [twitter.com]
This is not the first time North Korea has released hostages. They sent Otto Warmbier [wikipedia.org] back to Trump in a coma. Bill Clinton got Euna Lee and Laura Ling released intact back in 2009. Kim may just be sacrificing a couple of pawns in order to stall longer and make the peace talks look genuine.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 10 2018, @02:13PM (4 children)
From the Bloomberg link -- Trump tweeted:
> As everybody is aware, the past Administration has long been asking for three hostages to be released from a North Korean Labor camp, but to no avail. Stay tuned!
8:53 PM - May 2, 2018
Bloomberg > The problem? “Of the three prisoners only one, Kim Dong-cheol, a South Korean-born American pastor, was detained during the previous Obama administration.” The other two were detained last spring when Donald Trump was in the White House.
Trump lies all the time. This one strikes me as unusually insidious, however. To begin with, there’s something concrete and specific about it. It’s one thing to say that the economy sprung to life after Trump took office, even if statistics say that there’s not much change since the late Barack Obama years; one can certainly make a case for it, even if it requires a little cherry-picking of the right indicators. It’s a little different and worse to say that Obama failed to win the release of “three hostages” when two of them weren’t detained until he left office.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 10 2018, @04:32PM
B-b-b-but! He should have done more to get them released! Alex Jones said so!
(Score: 4, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Thursday May 10 2018, @06:22PM (2 children)
Not to mention the fact that Obama got 2 hostages released in 2009 and took a bunch of crap from the right over it because he was "negotiating with terrorists." [mcclatchydc.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by cmdrklarg on Thursday May 10 2018, @09:27PM (1 child)
Obama could have walked on water, cured the sick, and turned water into wine and would still have taken crap from the right.
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 10 2018, @10:33PM
Jesus did all of this. And the right could care about the poor as Jesus would. The right are so far from Christ it isn't funny. They cloak this with a feeble anti abortion push. But many fetuses naturally abort and shows God doesn't worry about fetuses. No verse in the bible does either.
So if Barak did all of that and is half black (insert a southern ladies gasp here) oh the horror.
To bad Barak wasnt change and did none of those. Including giving a rats ass about the poor.
We won't do Christ justice til the narrative changes and the poor are seen as possible to save. All of them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 10 2018, @02:33PM (2 children)
A room with one person and a mirror contains 2 lairs.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 10 2018, @03:40PM (1 child)
What is in the other lair, a lion perhaps?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 10 2018, @04:21PM
Never trust a lair. Never.
(Score: 5, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Thursday May 10 2018, @06:18PM
Bill Clinton got Euna Lee and Laura Ling released intact back in 2009
"Despite decades of bipartisan U.S. rhetoric about not negotiating with terrorists for the release of hostages, it seems that the Obama administration not only chose to negotiate, but to send a former president to do so,"
"The reporters' arrest, show trial and subsequent imprisonment (twelve years hard labor) was hostage taking, essentially an act of state terrorism,"
"So the Clinton trip is a significant propaganda victory for North Korea, whether or not he carried an official message from President Obama.”
--Trump's National Security Adviser John Bolton, who doesn't seem to mind propaganda victories anymore
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday May 10 2018, @03:54PM (1 child)
He only managed to put the brakes on a far more credible nuke program in Iran. What an asshole!
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 10 2018, @04:53PM
... where by "put the brakes on" we mean "legalize and fund it."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 10 2018, @04:10PM
Oh you poor idiot stuck neck deep in a hate filled swamp. I'll pray for you and your family.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by VLM on Thursday May 10 2018, @04:20PM (2 children)
It is kinda of humorous that the only opposition to Trump in the entire world seems to be out of touch Massachusetts liberal cat lady archetypes. And they don't even have the self awareness that the more they publicly hate him, the more the entire rest of the world likes him because of who hates him.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 10 2018, @04:31PM (1 child)
http://www.pewglobal.org/2017/06/26/u-s-image-suffers-as-publics-around-world-question-trumps-leadership/ [pewglobal.org]
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/18/trump-global-leadership-polls-344989 [politico.com]
I could build a nice wall out of that irony.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 10 2018, @05:29PM
Well it is VLM, his brain was assembled out of hobo clothes after running it through a washer with abnormally high amounts of bleach.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 10 2018, @05:44PM (1 child)
Who the fuck modded me Flamebait? This was clearly a Troll post and a damn successful one too if I might add. Thanks to all for playing.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 10 2018, @06:28PM
Don't get mad when your shitty trolling is taken seriously, roll with the punches and lament your own ability to impersonate the crazies around here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 10 2018, @09:02PM
As far as "credit", I believe the change is because NK's weapons actually work now. The first impact of that is that NK has more negotiation power now.
Second, the West can threaten to starve their population to stop WMD's without looking like heartless jerks. The counter-threats thus also carry more weight.