Kim Jong Il Thinks He's a God-King: Why Ignore It?

Brad De Long delong at econ.Berkeley.EDU
Wed May 24 08:00:11 PDT 2000



>Hey, look, I'm just a young graduate student, a budding
>Heidegger/Arendt scholar who knows, unfortunately, precious little
>of geopolitical machinations, but is it not obviously possible that
>both A and B are true:
>
>A) The leaders of North Korea are "totalitarian megalomaniacs."
>
>B) The American military presence in South Korea has little if
>anything with detering the "North Korean threat."
>
>Whether North Korea is governed by psychopaths or not has nothing to
>do with the capability of North Korea to effectively invade South
>Korea. There are totalitarian megalomaniacs in every psychiatric
>home, but that doesn't mean that it's excusable to deploy howitzers
>against them, after all. If the North Korean military is incapable
>of effectively invading South Korea, whether North Korea is headed
>by would-be Stalins or not, holding US troops there to defend
>against them is absurd.

This assumes that the North Korean government *knows* that the North Korean military is incapable of effectively invading South Korea. To assume that another government--particularly a government with its own strange ideology--views the world as you do is very dangerous. To keep an extra margin of deterrence is not necessarily stupid.

And your point (A) does tend to undermine (B)--totalitarian megalomaniacs (once again, I emphasize, Eric Hobsbawm's phrase, not mine) are dangerous neighbors.

Brad DeLong



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