Quoted:
First, let me get this out into the open first. I've been drinking today.
Second, some might know me from other posts about the shit happening in North Korea. And I'd like to expand and possibly conclude a guess I made earlier.
My basic takeaway from those was that military action was basically impossible without using massive military force, to possibly include nukes, likely triggering a large scale regional war with lots of casualties. Trump doesn't have the political capital to
start this war, so his unspoken but realistic options are to force a coup to remove Kim Jung Un or to do nothing and kick the can down the road for the sake of temporary piece. I was leaning more to the latter since the political landscape in Washington does not lend him to spend a lot of time dealing with North Korea (though I also think somebody within in Cabinet is running point on it with need for guidance, simply back filling Trump in). Steinhab was a sad panda.
Then I saw I'm surfing arfcom and I see this OP and the title catches my attention. I knew the new stupid EO sanctions bill that Trump signed had a stipulation that ordered him to make new sanctions against North Korea, I figured it was about that bill. But not so! I wasn't aware that the UN Security Council had also gotten involved. Lo and behold, it seems the US just got an ally in this endeavor, an important one. I dug a bit more and found an interesting article:
Stop missile tests, China tells North Korea
All of them are bullshit besides the first one. That list makes up most of North Korean annual exports, losing China as a trading partner on this would be if the Chinese lost the US for exporting cheap crap, or if McDonald's wasn't allow to sell to fat poor people (I love McDonalds, I'm allowed to talk shit about them). So to get to the point, this is bad for North Korea, this is a "holy shit, our economy is going to collapse no matter what we do to try to stop it" moment. Will that ever be said openly in any meeting between Kim and his minions? Fuck no, those men are never frank with one another, they are bullshitters who say the party line and then backfight behind closed doors. But I bet money that every one of Kim and his ministers are thinking how badly they are fucked now.
But we can do more. For months I've been saying it, I even told my wife about it, if we really wanted to totally fuck NK up and crank the pressure to induce a coup we'd somehow find a way get China to ban the export of their own oil into North Korea. Those commie fuckers have almost none of their own, they need to import everything and they are utterly reliant on Chinese oil. Back in the 90s that nasty famine was the result of them having modernized their agriculture using gas to fuel the tractors that were all coming from the USSR. When the USSR went under they stopped giving oil, they stopped helping with paying for infrastructure, so the NK agricultural industry came to a literal halt and supposedly millions starved as a result.
I search some more and found this article:
Chinese Oil Giant Cuts Off Fuel Sales to North Korea
Its from over a month ago, how the fuck did I miss this? Probably because the news is always just talking about mah Russia shit. But fuck it, I did find it and holy shit is this important. Sure, the reasoning they list for cutting sales is bullshit, a Chinese state owned oil company doesn't cut fuel sales to an entire nation just because of payment issues, they'd go into the red and the PRC govt would pay them back, since they fucking own the company anyway. They did it because President Xi told them to. So why did President Xi do it? Why did Xi order executives of companies owned by the PRC to stop selling them oil? Why did they just ban the import of everything of value that North Korea sells that isn't meth related?
(Fun fact: N. Korea make some top notch meth apparently).
I don't know what was said to Xi, what concession were paid, but a deal was made. There can be no other way that China went along with this, it violates historical Chinese-North Korean relationship, and at the time this is happening it would be too loss of face for Xi unless he profited from it. Maybe it was simply a return to 2016 status quo regarding tariffs and trade deals. Who knows? Whatever happened it was more than just Xi's "small heart grew three sizes." The point is a deal was made and now the waiting game begins.
Fat boy Kim is going to spend every meeting with his subordinates from this point forward sweating bullets while reaching for his hidden pistol because he has to know what is coming. He's a fucking goner. He can't trust anyone because everyone now has reason to kill him, their own future survival. His only option now, besides abandoning the nuke program entirely (lol), stepping down voluntarily (lol), is to saber rattle about starting a preemptive war of aggression to get them to drop the sanctions. But its a gamble, Kim can't win that war and if he uses his nukes (which are the only strategic weapons he has) then the retaliation means everyone running NK dies, their families die or end up as paupers (a bad thing in Korean culture everything done is to support the family). All their porn, their western booze, their mistresses, movie collections, secret gambling trips overseas and whoring, all of it is gone if they throw down.
Can this war still happen? Yes. We pushed Japan into a similar corner in WWII but there were many differences. There was much more parity between the US and the Japanese in '41. Their military situation wasn't just more equal, their plan could have worked had the circumstances been a bit different. They likely wouldn't win but they at least had some chance of accomplishing their overly ambitious goal. But the North Koreans, those fuckers have no chance of ultimate victory if they start a war of aggression. NK doesn't have the nuclear deterrent yet to protect it, and even if they do get a few ICBMs that wont work because they need overwhelming force for the nuclear deterrent to really work. That will take years. Within a year probably there wont be a single vehicle or generator in NK running. So while its possible war breaks out, most likely wont happen, they will all recognize that they can't win it, so a coup is more likely. If fighting does occur, it will probably be a civil war within the NK govt as ministers take action to ensure the survival of their power, their family, and the continued existence of their country.
And so, the Chinese have finally stepped the fuck up and the ultimate sanctions are on North Korea, and they'll soon be in their worse shape since their creation if they don't remove Kim Jung Un. How the fuck did this happen you might ask?
Have a beer, smile, enjoy your afternoon