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Robert E Kelly Profile picture
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6 Jan, 4 tweets, 2 min read
The S Korean right is gonna blow an election they easily could win. 5 years after Park Geun Hye, & they still haven’t got their act together.

SK left has policy ideas, like them or not. I’m not sure anyone knows what the right stands for besides a vaguely hawkish foreign policy
This is what I mean. Watch the S Korean right self-destruct for no good reason

m-en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN202201…
This is why S Korea needs a functional conservative party. The S Korean left’s toadying to N Korea is just appalling
FWIW, I made some suggestions 3 years about how the SK right might re-imagine itself post-Park impeachment (in Korean in @dongamedia)

Fairly disappointing the right blew 5 years in the wildness to return with nothing. *sigh*

asiansecurityblog.wordpress.com/2019/02/16/the…

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More from @Robert_E_Kelly

Robert E Kelly Profile picture
22 Oct 21
Who else prefers Leto to Paul Atreides?

Leto is a mediocre, basically good person struggling & failing w/ forces beyond him. He wants to rule consensually, feels a sense of duty to his liege, loves his family, & dies for these values. This makes him relatable and sympathetic.

1
Paul starts as a brat (like Luke) and just gets worse. He is surrounded by religious fanatics and becomes one himself in fairly short order. He drinks the kool-aid that he is some kind of messianic semi-divine being, a mash-up of Jesus and Plato's philosopher-king, and then

2
gets carried along to lead an interplanetary religious holocaust killing tens of billions

I've never understood how Paul & Fremen are supposed to be sympathetic. The ancien regime may have been corrupt & decrepit, but Harkonnens & Emperor weren't murdering ppl in the billions

3
Read 5 tweets
Robert E Kelly Profile picture
4 Oct 21
Worth remembering just what a boondoggle give-away to North Korea the Kaesong Industrial Zone was. 'Detente' it was not:

"Throughout its life cycle until its closure in 2016, the Kaesong complex faced nagging questions - not only about slave labor & unsafe working conditions,

1
but also about the use of its proceeds to fund Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program...Kaesong provided Pyongyang nearly $100 million a year in hard currency. No one but Kim Jong-un really knew where the money went. The N Korean workers at Kaesong were selected by the regime, had
2
no rights to strike or bargain for better working conditions, were not permitted to speak to their S Korean managers, and received as little as $2 a month out of $130 a month in “wages” paid to the N Korean government by the S Korean manufacturers who invested there. None of

3
Read 4 tweets
Robert E Kelly Profile picture
29 Sep 21
Good op-ed from @JRubinBlogger on why the Afghan withdrawal went about as well as can realistically be expected.

The evacuation was planned and moved out more people than expected despite early chaotic imagery.

Most Americans did get out, and the US

1
washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
gov't warned them for months but can't force people to go

There is no clean exit from a lost war with a brutal, mendacious counter-party like the Taliban. Obviously

The Trump Doha deal set the frame within which Biden operated, and had we violated it,

2
crooked.com/articles/biden…
the Taliban would hit back harshly. A small US force in Afghanistan could not have contained that offensive.

GOP critics knew the deal was Trump's and supported it. So most of the Fox critics about 'leaving our people behind' were bad faith.

The real issue is American

3
Read 6 tweets
Robert E Kelly Profile picture
19 Sep 21
THREAD: Why North Korea would Prefer Leaching Off South Korea to Absorbing It

There is a lot of debate on whether NK still seeks full-blown conquest/absorption of SK.

I am skeptical, bc I think the ruling Kim family are more degenerate gangsters than nationalist ideologues.

1
They won't seriously risk their rule or material perks for a psychological (nationalist) pay-off. In fact, IMO, both Koreas are de facto status quo states, despite de jure revisionism:

1. Talk is Cheap

So sure, both Koreas talk tough and maintain formal commitments to

2
unification, but talk is cheap obviously and leaders lie a lot. Unification might be formally retained as an end-goal, but only as a far-off, de rigeur ideal recited ceremonially, rather than actually seriously planned for or built into NK strategy. I could be convinced of the

3
Read 15 tweets
Robert E Kelly Profile picture
15 Sep 21
THREAD: Why there is No Korean Peace Treaty (It wouldn’t Change Anything)

Much of the linked thread is highly contestable:

A. Korea obviously is not a 'forever war'

This is a grossly inaccurate description. 'Forever war' implies sustained kinetic activity in an unwinnable

1
quagmire with no obvious endpoint. That is not K at all. The war has been over since mid-1953, and it is NK, not the allies, who provokes. The lack of paperwork - a formal peace treaty - has no bearing on the empirical situation on the ground which is far from open conflict.

2
B. A 'War-Ending Declaration' (종전선언) is a legally bizarre neologism which no one really understands

The only reason this strange language is used is bc the Moon government's first effort to get a 'peace treaty' failed, as did its second, vaguer 'peace regime' effort. So

3
Read 18 tweets
Robert E Kelly Profile picture
11 Sep 21
THREAD: Strategically, 9/11 was a one-off sucker-punch. That’s it.

1. 9/11 did not ‘change everything.’ In fact, it changed surprisingly little

This language was deployed to create political space for a vast expansion of US coercion, especially in the Middle East. If all the

1
rules have suddenly changed, then all sorts of behavior are suddenly permissible – like domestic spying, torture, and Iraq. But strategically, 9/11 did not change that much: US GDP continued to expand; US military power was scarcely affected; US alliances did not fracture; the

2
stock market re-opened after a few days and did not crash; gas prices did not spike; the global Islamic revolution Osama Bin Laden hoped this would ignite did not materialize:

2. 9/11’s big change was psychological – our shared national trauma fully

3
Read 17 tweets

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