Fear is Rational

Let’s talk about North Korea for a second. You know, that crazy little country somewhere in Asia with a nut-job dictator who lies to his people and doesn’t seem very stable. Over here in the U.S. (with a nut-job President who lies to his people and doesn’t seem very stable) we’re mighty afraid of North Korea. That fear is rational. They are a belligerent country with a large army and now, apparently, nuclear weapons, which they suggest they will use on their enemies if threatened, and they view the U.S. as their main adversary. They have serious social problems because they’ve spent so much money on their military but the only way for those in power to stay there is through controlling the population and whipping up support through nationalistic pride. Having a credible threat to fight against works to their advantage. We should be afraid of them.

Of course, they view us as a belligerent nation, with an even larger army and more nuclear weapons. We have a lot of problems in our society but we spend more on our military than anyone else on earth, more than the next ten countries combined. Our military-industrial complex keeps raking in enormous profits and our leaders constantly use the threat of attack to justify increasing their power and stifling the opposition. They are very afraid of us.

The biggest difference between our two countries’ perspective is that their fear is much more grounded in history.

Most Americans don’t know that history very well, but even a casual review will show their animosity to be very rational and their actions to be quite sane. Start with the end of WWII where the U.S. and Soviets arbitrarily divided the country in half with a dictator on each side. North Korea’s goal of unifying their country is as good a justification for war as any. During that war, their enemy ( de facto the U.S.) committed many war crimes. As many as a million civilians were killed in indiscriminate bombings, with more munitions dropped on their little country than we used in all of WWII. It was brutal. It ravaged their country in a way that the U.S. has not experienced since our Civil War. And the war technically never ended - there was no surrender, no truce, just a cease-fire that has held for a long time.

And during that period of relative peace, North Korea has watched the U.S. invade countries all around the globe. We’ve sent in troops, bombed places from the sky, fought proxy wars, all with the intent of imposing our will and way of life on the world. We often advocate for regime change under the pretense of bringing stability and democracy to a people, though that has never been the result. Even countries that work with us, especially those that agree to give up any nuclear aspirations (Iraq, Libya), are eventually subject to our need to destroy and replace. In fact, the only countries that appear to be safe from our interference are those who have a credible nuclear deterrent.

For over sixty years North Korea has shown that they are capable of restraint, that they understand the threat we pose and are not interested in entering into a war that will lead to their destruction. Sure, they talk about wiping us out, just as often as we talk about wiping them out, but they haven’t attacked South Korea, or the thousands of U.S. troops stationed there, or any of our allies in firing range. Their fear of the U.S. is rational and they have been behaving in a rational manner.

Now, this doesn’t mean they aren’t the bad guys. They have a repressive regime that literally tortures their own citizens who are often starving and freezing due to the poor state of the country. Their leader is quite possibly insane and most certainly evil. They are bad. But that doesn’t make us good. We helped create this mess and we certainly are responsible for our actions in the past which were also quite evil, and our record on the world stage is not a pleasant one. There isn’t always a good guy in every story.

The point is that we should be afraid of North Korea. We don’t want them to have nuclear weapons. But we don’t really have a moral high ground to make that demand or even a reasonable approach to enforce it. What we do have, hopefully, is two nation-states who bluster and threaten but up until now have shown the self-restraint necessary to avoid a war, nuclear or otherwise, which would assuredly kill hundreds of thousands of people on both sides. Let’s hope everyone keeps acting rationally.