Lianachan wrote:Trump and BoJo are responsible for numbers of deaths of their own citizens that ol’ Kimmy can only dream of.
Well, first, it's not intentional (although Cummings's herd immunity theory does make one wonder). And secondly, Kim probably has killed those numbers (certainly comparable to the UK), just maybe not in quite so short a time. Since North Korea doesn't release statistics (not sure if it even keeps them), who knows?
But Arneb has a point- maybe. The scenario that the West would like is for the South to oversee a nice, orderly reunification process. They would say, Arneb, why draw parallels with Iraq, Libya or Afghanistan - your own country offers a much better example! There are factors in favour of that. Korea was historically one country and continues to be ethnically pretty homogeneous. Its division was as artificial as Germany's as it came about in a very similar way. (Not quite the same - Korea was essentially a Japanese colony - but was still carved up by the Allies in the same way Germany was.) True, Ulbricht never attempted to "liberate" West Germany by force - Stalin understood that that would immediately have triggered World War III while Korea, handled carefully, would not - but the parallels are still there. Particularly if the means used to bring about regime change were different to those in Iraq, Libya, etc. (Debatable whether Gorbachev would, given where the Soviet Union was in 1989, have gone to war had the US and its allies "gone to the aid of the Czechoslovak / East German people", but the fact remains that George H.W. Bush had more sense.)
But that last point brings us to an important one re. Korea: the neighbours. China does not, definitively does not, want US military bases on the Yalu river. Been there, done that, wasn't great. And Putin, not as important a figure re. Korea as Xi but not irrelevant either, has long resented that the process that started in 1989 led swiftly to Poland, the Czech Republic, etc - and, even worse, the Baltic states - joining NATO and holding military exercises 60 km from St. Petersburg. On the other hand, China has excellent relations, including economic relations, with South Korea and regarded Kim as an increasing annoyance. If there was someone else in the White House, who knows what could happen? But now, with Trump .... (Arneb, when I next come to Brandenburg, an interesting discussion would be how 1989-90 would have played out if the Donald had been US President rather than George H.W.)
So we see. Latest reports are that Kim Jong-Un's sister is taking over - keeping it in the family.