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

[Brad De Long]

>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