Note: The problem is that North Korea attacking the U.S., Japan, or South Korea likely isn't the worst outcome. The worst outcome internationally would be the collapse of North Korea. South Korea in it's heart would love to take on North Korea and combine the two countries into one nation. But having done research about this they have realized doing that would bankrupt their country because of how damaged North Korea is now in every way. If North Korea actually collapses it would be a nightmare for South Korea, China, and the U.S. especially, but also a nightmare for the whole world and UN. First, who has control of their nuclear weapons? Then what does the world do with a people so completely brainwashed that they might be permanently non-functional anywhere else? What does one do with a nation of people that literally have been walking wounded since around 1950? end note.
What happens if North Korea collapses?
Pyongyang is threatening nuclear war. But that might not even be the worst-case scenario
A man walks past propaganda posters in Pyongyang, North Korea on March 26.
AP Photo/Kim Kwang Hyon
N
orth Korea shut down its last military hotline
to South Korea on Wednesday, warning that nuclear war was imminent. The
threat was the latest in a series of increasingly belligerent
statements made by the Hermit Kingdom since world leaders imposed
sanctions as punishment for the communist regime's recent missile and
nuclear tests. Pyongyang has threatened to nuke both South Korea and the
U.S.On the bright side, security experts say North Korea doesn't have the ability to strike the U.S., and war on the Korean Peninsula is far from inevitable. "The North's wild gesticulations are unsettling," but "this is the seventh time Pyongyang has renounced the 1953 ceasefire" with the South, Doug Bandow points out at The American Spectator. "War has yet to erupt." One can't take anything for granted, but there's little reason to believe that North Korea's untested young leader, Kim Jong Un, "and those around him have turned suicidal after the death of his father."
North Korea is certainly dangerous, but as many experts point out, this is a war that the West would likely win. Perhaps that's why officials in Washington have been planning to confront "a more insidious threat: the untimely collapse of Kim Jong Un's government," says Geoffrey Ingersoll at Business Insider. This is the most closed-off country in the world. If its struggling regime finally collapses, our forces will have to dash over the 38th parallel blind to secure North Korea's nuclear stockpiles and long-range missiles in a rush that will make "the Pentagon's frenzied scramble looking for Iraq's WMD's look calm and orderly by comparison."
The Army has conducted war games to prepare, says James Joyner at Outside the Beltway, and it took 90,000 American troops 56 days to get into a dummy failed nuclear state and round up its nukes. If we ever do have to go into North Korea, "it would not be a cakewalk."
The trouble is, says Robert Taylor at PolicyMic, the "threats, sanctions, and dangerous, tax-guzzling war games off the Korean peninsula" are costing the U.S. big-time, even if there's no war and the North Korean regime somehow manages to stay afloat. With President Obama's pivot to Asia, we're adding to billions to the fortune we've spent meddling in Korean affairs over the past several decades. In this time of sequester cuts, Taylor says, this kind of thing could be "disastrous to the fiscal state of America." As Dennis Rodman suggested, maybe the time has come for the U.S. to "try a little basketball diplomacy instead."
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