War in North Korea is not inevitable - no matter what the hawks say

Speaking of the way Americans are sold wars of choice as no choice at all:

While the Kim regime is technically a Communist government, the ideology that governs North Korea is known as “Juche” (or, more technically, “neojuche revivalism”). The official state ideology is a mixture of Marxism and ultra-nationalism. Juche is dangerous because it is infused with the historical Korean concept of “songun,” or “military-first,” and it channels all state resources into the North Korean military—specifically its nuclear program. Juche is not a self-defensive ideology. Rather, it is a militaristic and offensive belief system. If the North gets a fully functional nuclear arsenal, they will use those weapons to strike at their American, South Korean, and Japanese enemies.

Get that: If North Korea gets the right combination of nukes and missiles, it will definitely attack the United States. Which leads to the inevitable conclusion: "Given these facts, why should we waste precious time on negotiations that will only empower the North and weaken the rest of us? We should be preparing for conflict on the peninsula, not begging the North to take more handouts from us as they build better nuclear weapons."

But there's plenty of reason not to believe that North Korea will automatically strike the United States if it's capable.

Here's why. If North Korea launched nukes at America, America would launch its nukes at North Korea. Everybody knows this. The North Koreans know this. This is not in doubt. It is difficult to establish one's dominance over a continental peninsula if you, along with the peninsula, are smoking, radioactive ash.

As NBC News reports: "The country says it wants a nuclear bomb because it saw what happened when Iraq and Libya surrendered their weapons of mass destruction: their regimes were toppled by Western-backed interventions. It wants to stop others, namely the administration of President Donald Trump, from toppling its totalitarian regime."

The North Korean regime is awful. But that penchant for self-preservation means it's unlikely to start a war that will end with its destruction. Understand, there's a long history of this. America's hawks warned that Iran's mullahs had a messianic ideology that would cause them to lash out with nuclear weapons once they were capable; we invaded Iraq because we didn't want Saddam Hussein to prove he had weapons "in the form of a mushroom cloud."

The essential idea is always that nations unfriendly to the United States are so irrational, care so little for their own survival, that they're willing to commit civilizational suicide via a nuclear attack on the U.S. or its allies. But it hasn't happened yet.

So when hawks make that case for war, make them prove it. Point out that history hasn't worked out that way so far. Point out that we've invaded a country to no good end because of similar thought processes. But never merely accept that we have to choose war. It's not inevitable, no matter how much hawks sell it as such.

Cross-posted at SixOh6.