Trump arranging a hit on Nth Korea, page-100

I tend to think the hysterical 'devotion' to Kim is less like Japanese Emperor-worship in WW2, and more of a brittle construct borne of decades of abject terror instilled by the most brutal regime on earth.

However, self-reliance and fear of US attack is also fostered every day, so it is hard to imagine the population quickly grasping any such attack as an opportunity for 'liberation'.

Makes sense if the recent murder of Kim's brother was for Kim to close off an obvious, less disruptive solution for China to implement.

I suppose Trump thinks China can still engineer the regime change if they really want to. The new guy can keep being a commie dictator as long as nukes are out of the picture.

The nukes are really the tipping point. It's one thing for Kimmy to be ranting at the US and threatening to set its cities on fire, it's another thing altogether if he looks like having the capacity to try it - on any nuclear scale.

The US worked itself into a lather about Iraq's imaginary WMD's and bombed the crap out of them, when Iraq had never uttered a threat about attacking the continental US at all. All it took was a few senior administration members with a straight face to utter those magic words 'clear and present danger' and some arrows drawn on grainy black and white pictures of trucks and sheds and the US public was ready for the army to roll.

Netanyahu jumped the shark with his acme bomb drawing to illustrate the threat of the Iranian nuclear program, but the US has much more fodder to feed the appearance of real threat from NK.

Indeed, the threats are real, at least insofar as having been uttered, and what is in it for the US to be happy to conclude they won't ever be carried out? Most countries don't want to be turned into glass in retaliation, but if you're Kim, it's only ever about you and you can't live forever. 'What a glorious sacrifice to strike a blow' or some other delusional idea might take hold.

I think China will understand the growing likelihood that US really is just not going to let it happen, even if a terrible price has to be paid. China has recently dragged hundreds of millions out of poverty - the Party isn't going to be sanguine that the people are going quietly cop going from apartments and nightclubs back to dirt-floor huts and hard-scrabble farming.

Strategically, the US is still massively more militarily powerful than everyone else and Trump seems a solution-orientated person who is set on fixing this intractable problem before it becomes unfixable. My hope is the Chinese are smart enough to judge a good time and an effective method of acting before Trump does.