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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   1625 thread views

Transnational Thursday for January 18, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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North Korea

Kim Jong Un says he no longer wants to reunify with South Korea:

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said his country would no longer pursue reconciliation with South Korea and called for rewriting the North’s constitution to eliminate the idea of shared statehood between the war-divided countries, state media said Tuesday.

The historic step to discard a decades-long pursuit of a peaceful unification, which was based on a sense of national homogeneity shared by both Koreas, comes amid heightened tensions where the pace of both Kim’s weapons development and the South’s military exercises with the United States have intensified in a tit-for-tat.

Not that all that much progress was happening towards reunification before, but still I guess its newsworthy.

North Korea has also sent its Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui to Russia to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. In the west this has raised suspicions on North Korea provided more weaponry for Russia in the Ukraine conflict.

If the United States gets embroiled in simultaneous hot wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and the Taiwan strait, it massively changes the potential success calculus for a North Korean Invasion. Especially now that it’s starting to become apparent that ammunition stocks for Western advanced weapons are not very well supplied. That doesn’t mean that Kim will necessarily go for it, but at the very least it gives him a card to bluff with.

North Korea's dysfunction does extend to its air force, or so I've heard. It's hard to invade a country that has a vastly superior air force.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Korea_Air_Force#Aircraft

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_People's_Army_Air_Force#Aircraft

Even with the element of surprise, it's hard to imagine that North Korea could neutralize this disadvantage.

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