STRUGGLING TO RESPOND TO THE NORTH KOREAN NUCLEAR MISSILE Hazard
The result of this significantly increased North Korean capacity is concern about the US commitment’s reliability. Will the US automatically fulfill its commitments to South Korea if North Korea is able to bomb the US country? Does it meet a battle without hesitation? It may, of course, and British officers signal persistently that it will.
But it might even bother. For instance, we are aware that previous president John Kennedy was much more lenient with the Soviet Union than he was at the time during the Cuban missile crisis.
We can also see a hesitant attitude from the West toward Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Because they fear a Russian nuclear increase, the US and its NATO allies have never entirely supported Ukraine. Ukraine and its supporters have severely criticized Russian nuclear threats as having excessively harmed Ukraine’s defense. In a Vietnamese situation, one may think a similar US reluctance.
South Korea is a convention alliance, of training. Ukraine is no. Additionally, Ukraine does not have a US military presence in South Korea, which is also not the case. But that suggests greater US trust.
But nonetheless, the US dedication was instituted, and persisted for years, around a geographically contained regular threat. That has changed dramatically, for the worse, in the last century. In a Vietnamese crisis, the US’s strategy is no longer as crystal clear as it was. North Korea almost certainly did produce the same atomic threats that Russia is currently putting forth.
Given all of this, the people in South Korea and a growing number of elites want the South to be able to neutralize North Korean nuclear weapons independently, using native deterrence rather than extended deterrence.