A Quote by M. Stanton Evans
Soviet expansionism in Europe, the battle for control of China, and the 1950 invasion of South Korea would shatter once-euphoric dreams of post-war cooperation with the Kremlin.
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China is ruthlessly pragmatic. It supports North Korea for its own selfish interests. And I believe that China no longer considers us an ally. The current president, Xi Jinping, cultivates close relations with South Korea. He has never met with me, the leader of North Korea, something that the leader of China has always done. At the grand celebrations in Beijing two years ago commemorating the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, he placed the president of Russia and the president of South Korea at his side. In North Korea, we pay a lot of attention to ceremonies and what they signal.
In contrast, Western historians, and those in South Korea, say the North attacked the South on June 25, 1950. Both sides agree that after the war began, the North Korean Army captured Seoul in three days and pushed as far south as Pusan before American troops arrived to drive back the North Koreans nearly as far north as the border to China.
Just as that little opening in the Iron Curtain that Hungary created caused a flood of people out, and ultimately the beginning of the end of communism in Europe, if you could get refugee flows coming out of North Korea, while there'd be a very difficult humanitarian problem in the short run, both for China and South Korea, in the long run it would lead to reunification.
I think the regime in North Korea is more fragile than people think. The country's economic system remains desperate, and one thing that could happen for example would be under a new government in South Korea, to get the South Korean government to live up to its own constitution, which says any Korean who makes it to South Korea, is a Korean citizen. A citizen of the Republic of Korea. And you could imagine the impact that would have inside North Korea if people thought, "If I could get out and make it to South Korea, I could have a different life."
The Western world doesn't really give enough credit to the importance in history of the Soviet invasion and the subsequent war in Afghanistan. For us it was a sideshow of the Cold War. For the Islamic world it was an unprovoked infidel invasion of a Muslim country not unlike Iraq.
It fell to President Harry Truman to contain Soviet expansionism. He built America's first peacetime alliances, starting in Western Europe, then in Asia.
To be sure, China is nowhere as powerful as the U.S., but it has acquired the ability to impose its will on individual nations around the world. From Australia to Germany, South Africa to South Korea, political leaders are careful not to rub China the wrong way.
We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, someway or another, and some in South Korea too. Over a period of three years or so, we killed off - what - twenty percent of the population of Korea as direct casualties of war, or from starvation and exposure?
Once the Eastern Bloc collapsed, what I call 'historical spontaneity' prevailed and the countries that were subject to Soviet control naturally gravitated to the West. That's where they sought their security; I don't think there was a way to avoid that. If we tried to exclude them, we would have today not one Europe, we would have three Europes: one in the West, one in the middle and one in the East, and the middle would be insecure and a tempting target. The insecurity felt [today] by Eastern Europe would be replicated on a much larger and more consequential scale.
I want to destroy the EU, not Europe! I believe in a Europe of nation-states. I believe in Airbus and Ariane, in a Europe based on cooperation. But I don't want this European Soviet Union.
If America would withdraw from South Korea, there could be a power struggle between such as China and Japan.
The U.S. along with China, Japan, South Korea and Russia has an important role to play in containing North Korea's nuclear ambitions and exerting all the influence we can possibly exert.
[We] mention the South China Sea, we mention North Korea, South Korea, we mention Ukraine. We could mention five others. Yemen, and this, and that. How many places can we do this? We have a country that is a debtor nation, we have an infrastructure that is crumbling all over the place, 60% of the bridges we have in this country are in trouble.
In the 1980s America reacted to the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan. We supported a war that left a nation torn to pieces. And as the last Soviet tank left the country, so did we.
We refugees, we become always a punchbag. A political punchbag between China and South Korea and North Korea.
World War Two was a world war in space. It spread from Europe to Japan, to the Soviet Union, etc. World War Two was quite different from World War One which was geographically limited to Europe. But in the case of the Gulf War, we are dealing with a war which is extremely local in space, but global in time, since it is the first 'live' war.
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