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Man, this is such a strange conversation! I don't want to accuse you of being an NK propaganda tool but... I feel like you're hitting a lot of their talking points.
Let's go back to the start:
It makes no sense that they would invade a peaceful neighbor just one random terrorist- who defected from North Korea! tried to lob a homemade bomb at their leader. That sounds like something North Korean army officers would use as an excuse. Kim Il Sung was looking to take over all of Korea ever since the day he got into power, and was heavily backed by the USSR the whole time, just waiting for the right time to invade. They invaded 4 years after the assassination attempt, during which South Korea made absolutely no attempt to kill Kim Il Sung or even build up their military.
You want to make a meme connecting Trump to Kim Il Sung... why? Kim Il Sung is not very popular in the US, even among the fringe online right. Are you trying to make Kim Il Sung more popular with Trump fans?
Every country has some degree of cyberwarfare ability, sure. But most of them simply keep it in reserve as an emergency warfware option, or (like the US and Israel) occasionally to target terrorists and nuclear weapons development. North Korea uses it regularly, either to "earn respect" for their regime, or to bring in foreign cash when they have no legitimate exports. See eg: https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/dprk-cyber-espionage.pdf. These attacks are increasing over time, suggesting that they are gaining technical skills and are not bound by any sort of international norms. This is actually becoming a large part of their "economy!" ("Remarkably, North Korea is also deemed responsible for the world’s biggest cryptocurrency heist, worth $530 million, to the detriment of the Japanese exchange Coincheck.34 It appears cyber thefts have become an integral part of Pyongyang’s strategy as a way of survival.")
Not the point. I'm sure these academic exchanges don't directly teach hacking capabilities. But it's opportunity cost. When they teach basic, civilian skills for free, which Pyongyang would have had to fund itself, that allows the regime to use its own resources to create more "cyberwarriors." It's the same pattern we've seen from North Korea again and again- Giving them food, money, or technical equipment does not help their people like it would a normal country. It simply lets the regime transfer more people and resources into its military. Giving them food during the 90s famine didn't stop their military buildup, and the more recent sunshine policy did nothing to halt their nuclearization or cyberwarfare programs.
In a larger sense- you said you teach computer science? I'm sure you know more about computer and programming than I do. But don't you think the state department knows more about diplomacy and military matters than you? Of course your NK colleagues seem nice, they're not going to put you next to someone who's openly hostile. But the state department can monitor the nasty parts of their government much more than you can as a visiting professor, and there's a good reason why the government has decided that it's a bad idea to give them technical help or even to travel there as a tourist. Don't be a Useful Idiot.
Eh.. sorry it got strange. I definitely don't think the North should have invaded the South. It was a bad decision morally and strategically, and it decimated the Korean people. I just think it's worth understanding our enemies' motivations in order to be able to accurately predict their future behavior, which is necessary to make them less dangerous.
I understand your point about opportunity costs, and think it's quite valid. We just have a different model of how collaboration works. Your model is:
My model is:
Of course, details matter about which model is true in any situation. I think the specific examples I've shown are solidly in the second category.
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For what it's worth, I thought the 2014 Sony Pictures hack was hilarious and saw it as a vague fargroup vs vile neargroup.
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I don't disagree personally but countries do stuff like that all the time.
What I've been taught in history class is that the casus belli and the reason for war are different. 99% of the time, at least.
Doesn't that make the case for "countries do it all the time" even stronger? I thought the original argument is that a respectable country would not use such a trivial casus belli.
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"all the time?" Like what? Do you think Trump is going to invade Pennsylvania to get revenge for the assassination attempt?
Following a single terrorist attack, the US invaded two countries that had nothing to do with it. You might have also heard of a minor skirmish called World War I.
Not at all similar, for what I think should be obvious reasons.
I don't see any obvious reasons, and anything I can think of seems pretty superficial.
We invaded Afghanistan because they were sheltering Osama Bin Laden. We invaded Iraq as a result of a whole chain of events that didn't even start with 9/11. You can call the reasons bad and I wouldn't necessarily disagree, but it's not true that we just arbitrarily decided to attack a country because of one "unrelated" terrorist attack. That's like saying we went to war with Japan because a couple of ships got sunk. (And in fact Pearl Harbor was really only the proximate cause of a war that had been inevitable for a number of years.)
World War I might have been triggered by a single assassination, but it was basically a couple of countries who'd been waiting for an excuse to go to war, and then a bunch of other countries dragged in by a complicated web of treaties.
It really isn't comparable to claiming that North Korea up and decided to invade South Korea because a North Korean expat attempted an assassination.
Thank you for writing this! This is basically exactly what I would have written if I had more motivation to write a response.
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IIRC, the Taliban wasn't even particularly unreasonable, it's just that the US was in no mood to jump through the hoops of a bunch of mountain-dwelling goatherders.
I'm about 80% sure that 9/11 was one of the stated reasons for invading Iraq. If you want to say that, as in the case of WWI, it might have been the stated reason but it wasn't the real reason, than it is actually no different from NK stating they're invading SK over a terrorist attack. Like I said countries do this stuff all the time.
9/11 was a stated reason for invading Iraq, but only in an indirect way. 9/11 was treated as evidence that being reactive rather than proactive about terrorism risk was unacceptable, and from that premise even a small probability of Iraq developing serious functional WMDs was deemed to be unacceptable, because we couldn't afford to wait until "the smoking gun becomes a mushroom cloud", to quote the most memorable phrase.
But that's the stated reasons, and a vengeful public was not really listening closely.
"Neither Bush nor senior administration officials directly linked Iraq or its leader to the planning or execution of the 9/11 attacks. Yet a sizable majority of Americans believed that Hussein aided the terrorist attacks that took nearly 3,000 lives.
The same month that Congress approved the use of force resolution against Iraq, 66% of the public said that “Saddam Hussein helped the terrorists in the September 11th attacks”; just 21% said he was not involved in 9/11."
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We had already fought a war with Iraq in the 90s. When we invaded the second time, it was mostly about Iraq invading Kuwait, and claims about chemical weapons. Yeah, there was some talk also that Saddam sponsored terrorism, but the administration never tried to link him directly to 9/11 (though you probably did hear a lot of uninformed people making the connection at the time).
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