Earlier this evening I heard a coworker express a sentiment that, unfortunately, I've heard many times. Fox News is on 24-7 in our break room and they were reporting the provocative words and actions of the North Korean military. My coworker had a simple solution to this complicated problem: "We should just drop some nukes on them and be done with it." Now, I know he was just speaking off the cuff, and I would like to think that if he had the opportunity to melt the entire population of another country that he would decline to do so. But it still bothers me that murdering millions of people seems like reasonable foreign policy to some.
"But what if they were to nuke us first", I can hear you ask. "We have to kill them before they can kill us." The first thing I would like to ask you is who are "they" and who is "us"? Do you believe that the tyrannical government of the North Koreans should be conflated with the citizenry of that nation? Should they be punished for the actions of a mad man? If the United States government commits a heinous crime, is it your children who should be punished? My point is that this conflict is between governments. The government, despite what they teach us in social studies, is not the people. I have no beef with any North Korean citizen, and I suspect that neither do you. And yet, we are taxed to pay for a massive military that can surround an impoverished little socialist dictatorship that can't even keep the lights on at night. "Okay", you might concede. "But maybe Kim Jong-un does conflate us with our government. Perhaps the only way to save American children from being nuked is to nuke him. It's sad that this means innocent men, women, and children will also die, but that is on Kim and not us. I don't want anyone to die. But if I have to choose between Americans being slaughtered or North Koreans being slaughtered, I have to go with the latter." It seems to be more palatable to enter into this line of thinking when we are considering dropping bombs from extraordinary heights on people in a faraway land who we will never have to see. But what if there were no nuclear bombs and it was determined that you had to shoot your way through the citizenry in order to get to the Korean leaders. What if you had to line up each man, woman, and child and shoot them in the head? Maybe we would begin to ask if there was another way. Perhaps this problem can be resolved without resort to barbaric bloodshed. Perhaps the idea that "we" have to kill "them" before "they" kill "us" is a false dichotomy.
The U.S.'s aggressive "war games" off the shore of North Korea and economic sanctions only prove to rile up the rulers there and convince them that they need more powerful weapons in order to preserve their positions as the ruling elite of that miserable land. Imagine if the North Koreans or the Chinese were practicing war tactics off the California coast. There would be hell to pay. I propose that the U.S. should unilaterally deescalate this conflict by being the bigger man and walking away instead of flexing its muscles in an attempt to intimidate the much smaller and weaker opponent. We, the citizens of the United States, have nothing to gain from a war with the Koreans. We have nothing to lose if the military packs up and heads home. The South Koreans and Japanese are several magnitudes wealthier than their socialist neighbor. They are more than capable of defending themselves without a subsidy from the American taxpayer.
America has a lot of problems to face here at home these days. Killing innocent foreigners will solve none of them. Don't let the government or the media divert your attention from the real issues that put you at risk, like the continuing destruction of the currency and the continuing assault on the Bill of Rights.
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