Not at all; if they're not an objective military threat than they're not an objective military threat, whether they know it or not.
Say that Luxembourg were to fall under the power of psychopaths dedicated to world conquest. It wouldn't entail that the US would be justified in planting a giant military force in Frankfurt to defend the Bundesrepublik from the Luxembourgian Menace.
>
>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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