Round 1 on points to NK

There was a great piece on 60 minutes last year where they went inside US Strategic Command and talked to the commander about the whole process.

IIRC, he basically said his job is to confirm the identity of the President and then follow orders. I think he said he would talk through options with the President and make recommendations, but ultimately it's the President's call. They might only have a couple minutes to decide.

Anyway, I doubt a launch order would be sabotaged. These guys are trained to follow orders.

Wrong screenname too. Definitely a wolf.

Not that Trump cares about Guam aside from looking bad. If KJU was smart and seasoned, he would have threatened West Virginia.

If he'd been even smarter he'd have threatened a non-massive but still significant city on the East coast like, oh, Philadelphia, leaving his powder dry from LA and NY etc.

Don't mean to pick on you, but you keep saying stupid ****.

We were talking about Trump making up reasons to believe NK had mini nukes without consensus from an intelligence community that he's made crystal clear he doesn't trust.

You're talking about whether or not Trump ever used those words before. Who cares??

Really, we're talking about nuclear ****ing war with a maniac and you're STILL defending YOUR BOY for escalating it. If you don't see what's wrong with that, you're beyond help.

Shut up, Trumpkin.

Got slow ponied a bit as I was just about to write:

"Since Trump and most Americans don't care much about the people of Guam but can pretend otherwise, threatening that island was bad strategy. Trump can now say something like "I dare you, you fat idiot to harm one person on Guam" while continuing with his provocative military maneuvers. IF NK backs down from their threat it shows they were bluffing. If they don't, Trump has justification to destroying the country that almost no one will argue with. NK should not have turned Guam residents into poker chips."

But it's totally fine for Trump to use the millions of people in Seoul as poker chips, because something something

Trump got too much credit at least 2 or 3 times in your post. He's on level 0. In this case, it's the military propping him up.

David might not have his finger on the pulse of the American left, but he can put his finger on my pulse any time

Probably not really true. Its amazing how posters here seem to think that people who normally don't care about ideology could all of a sudden turn suicidal over it.

That relates to my post? I was saying that North Korea didn't realize that Guam citizens are equivalent to South Koreans to most Americans. Both are poker chips that Trump doesn't mind risking.

But what if Americans aren't sociopaths?

To be fair, our President is.

Sklansky Sklanskiing itt.

imo the main threats are

1) an overzealous colonel or whatever in the NK army launching a first strike on SK due to bad intel/ambition/etc, leading to all hell breaking loose

2) NK leadership may or may not be basing their actions on sound info

saddam in 1990 thought his army could fight the US to a stalemate. why? cos ppl who delivered bad news often ended up demoted or dead, therefore after a while no one ever gave him any bad news. so he ended up basing his actions on a set of fantastical assumptions which had nothing to do with reality

both threats obv exacerbated by the latest escalation

"Nobody knew that nuclear war could be so complicated!" -TRUMP, soon.

Worth noting that this clusterf*ck is yet another gift from the Bush administration. I mean, they went on about how Iraq, Iran, and NK were some axis of evil hell bent on developing nukes, but then the only one they actually did anything about was Iraq -- probably because it was low hanging frui5 from a military point of view -- and then f*cked the whole thing up beyond belief. Not only did Iraq not have nukes, but even after determining that they still allowed Saddam to get tried and hung, which of course only strengthened the resolve of the other two to get theirs.

Seriously anyone who thinks that there's a single member of the GOP worth an ounce of dog **** needs their head examined.

He should've threatened Bedminster, NJ. I'd love to see the look on Trump's face when the secret service bursts in to take him off to some remote bunker somewhere.

Thank you?

rara, do you understand the simple concept that just because you interpret Trump's "fire and fury, likes of which world hasnt seen before blah blah blah" one way, our good friend Kim might interpret it a completely different way?

Like, the conversation is less about whether or not Trump actually means it based on times he has used that sort of phrase in the past, and more about whether or not NK will interpret it as bluster.

It's a simple point, to be fair, but your post makes it seem as though it is lost on you.

The self righteous pricks and cooks that voted 3P are somehow still smug amongst everything.

One things for sure in all of this and that's that Tillerson is pretty much useless.

I am actually becoming increasingly worried about the North Korean situation. I think that a war is a very real possibility.

Your reflexive instinct in reading that first statement would probably be to think that I am being an alarmist. But I don't necessarily think that's true. Consider that humans are terrible at quantifying the probabilities of events that they subconsciously believe won't happen. Think about how many people on this forum bet huge amounts of money on Trump not getting elected, Brexit not happening, etc, despite what the polls said.

Now, consider this:

1.) Trump's #1 fear in life is looking weak. There was a good psychological profile on him in the Atlantic around election time. This is part of the reason that Trump only respects people that are alpha males, have military backgrounds, or are super rich. He respects strength, and he abhors weakness and looking weak.

2.) Up until now, Trump has been bluffing on NK. NK knows this and is calling him out on it. This make Trump looks weak. Ergo, psychologically, there is a good chance that he is going to be inclined to take action, to prove that he isn't weak (I realize this is pop psychology, this is just my analysis of the situation).

3.) Decisive action against NK is probably strategically justified. At the end of the day, nobody wants a madman like Kim Jong Un having the potential to strike the United States. If we have to confront them, better now than 5 years from now when they have more nukes and can threaten the United States. Trump's generals know this, and are probably advising of him of this.

4.) Mattis just issued a very stern statement warning North Korea. This is a marked escalation. Trump talking is... Trump talking. But Mattis is different. The man is a bull. He isn't f*cking around when he makes a statement like the one that he issued today. This is a very serious indication that military options are absolutely being considered at the highest levels.

5.) The smart thing for Kim Jong Un (or whatever the f*ck his name is) to do would be to find a way to back down while saving face. The problem right now from a game theory perspective is that he's declaring "drive on" and betting that Trump will swerve, and Trump is declaring "drive on" and betting Kim Jong Un will swerve. Based on #1, Trump is unlikely to swerve if push comes to shove. Therefore, given that there is absolutely no way KJU survives a war with the United States, he should find a graceful way to back down immediately.

In the interim, better brace for some volatility in your stock portfolios in the coming months. The weeks leading up to a resolution of this Guam situation most likely aren't going to be pretty.

How about just saying something like "How did you morons ever think I was doing more than bluffing? Did you really think that we thought we could win a war? We have legitimate grievances against the United States and under normal circumstances our strategy probably would have resulted in concessions we were morally entitled to. But now it appears we got unlucky in that somehow the US voted in a madman who doesn't mind killing us all. So we must revise our strategy. Hopefully the international community will start to become more sympathetic to our plight regarding America's unfriendly actions targeting us."