cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/59118855
- “Given the increasingly severe international situation, I believe we may truly be at a turning point in history,” Japanese Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya said at the start of the meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Tae-yul. “That makes it even more important to overcome division and confrontation through dialogue and cooperation,” he added.
The obliteration of Ukraine in NATO’s proxy war and Europe’s self-inflicted economic collapse are making US vassals in Asia nervous. Japan and South Korea are waking up to the fact that their prosperity and security are just as negotiable. As Europe’s industries flee to America and Ukraine lies in ruins, Tokyo and Seoul are quietly recalculating their futures, realizing loyalty to a declining hegemon buys only a front-row seat to their own demise.
You know I have been waiting for the eventual Japanese realignment with China and that I am always eager to see the latest developments. I cannot say the same for SK. What is the path for SK to shed the yoke of US occupation? Does it have to lose a civil war with the north before it can shed the yoke or does it have to shed the yoke before reunification is possible?
The way things are going in SK, it might just implode politically at some point.
That just means more US management though
If the regime collapses, the north might move in.
I feel like that would put the north in a hot conflict with the US pretty fast and China would not signal to the north that they would support.
I think that will all depend on the state of the US in the next few years. If US crashes economically, they might not be in a position to do anything about it.
Well yeah, in that case I would imagine Japan realigning with China, which then encircles Korea. I doubt the DPRK wants to fight a civil war given how much suffering has already befallen the Korean people, it would be very difficult to justify even more suffering. More than likely SK will get pressured to push the last vestiges of the US military out in order to participate fully in regional cooperation, and that’s the condition DPRK is looking for to begin pursuing peaceful reunification.
The agenda items being reported, seem to talk down china, and so effectively a continuance of Biden foreign policy demands.
Not likely to provide any rapprochement. But talking is step 1.
Indeed, it’s gonna be a long road before anything substantial happens.
I can’t trust anything coming out of countries occupied by the US. And it’s likely the same for China, these diplomatic statements are a whole nothingburger.
I agree these statements alone aren’t really worth much, it’s going to be interesting to see if there’s going to be a general political shift to improve relations with China going forward though. The US economy isn’t exactly in a great shape right now, and they’re fighting a tariff war with everyone. This will further erode relations with the vassals going forward.
I’m convinced that they’ll happily rejoin the American Empire’s fold nonetheless after Trump’s administration has ended.
That was definitely the mood during the first Trump term, but it does seem that the realization is slowly sinking in that the nature of the relationship between the US and the vassals is changing.
Yet they’re all maintaining their anti-Chinese tarrifs and policies; some are expanding upon them like Mexico.
The US has a huge amount of economic leverage over them by design, so they can’t just openly go against the US demands. It’s going to be a process from realizing they need to wean themselves off the US market to actually making it happen.
The problem is that decoupling from the US is a very complicated process, especially when it comes to technology. Well, it’s complicated in the sense of how to decouple without hurting corporate profits/control, or giving rise to a populist momentum.
Indeed, the oligarchs don’t want to rock the boat and they will fight any attempts to redirect trade because that would negatively affect them.
80th anniversary of the end of World War Two - which pitted China against Japan
Interesting way of saying, “…in which Japan savagely attacked China and just about everywhere else in the region, and as far away as Pearl Harbor.”
But we mustn’t be mean to our allies right? Nanjing was only a little massacre and they are already pissed off at us because our military personnel keep raping their women.
Tokyo and Seoul are close allies to Washington, hosting thousands of U.S. troops on their soil.
Yes hosting lmao
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No. Korea, the nation, was occupied by Japan. It existed as an occupied nation. The USA, after nuking Japan, took over the Japanese colony on the Korean peninsula. The Korean people resisted the occupiers when they were Japanese, and again when they were American. The Russians supported the Korean people in their resistance of the occupying forces of the Americans. The Americans found all of the Koreans that were allied with their oppressors as their mode of survival and supported them in their reactionary defense against liberation. On doing so, the USA negotiated a partitioning of Korea with the USSR to avoid direct conflict between America and the USSR. That partitioning allowed the foreign occupation of Korea to continue.
South Korea is not a nation, it’s a colonial state. They do not have sufficient sovereignty to voluntarily host their occupiers. The Korean people in South Korea are the result of separating out the Koreans who sought liberation and killing them in the north of the country - the people left were dominated or complicit. There’s nothing voluntary about that.
The southern portion of the Korean peninsula would still exist as Korea with or without the USA. The difference would not be that it would or would not “exist at all” but rather whether it would exist as an occupied colony or as an independent nation-state.
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I don’t think you know what a nation is. The Korean people are a nation - from the Latin root natus, they all share a common birth. However, there are two states, North Korea and South Korea. Both of them are internationally recognized states, meaning we currently have one nation (Korea) split between two states. The split between these states is entirely a construction of imperialism. The people in DPRK and the people in the occupied South do not constitute different nations nor is the 38th parallel a historical division within and among the Korean people that would constitute a meaningful boundary for their self-determination.
The Americans had no business being there at all nor demanding a partition of a nation of people. They did so as part of maintaining colonial occupation for the purpose of anti-conmunism both against the USSR and also against the emerging PLA in China. The US destroyed everything north of the 38th parallel to punish the portion of the Koreans who decided they would not allow their country to continue to be a colony. The USA bombed the countryside until pilots literally went on bombing runs and came back with full payloads because there were no more targets left to bomb. The USA used so much napalm that Koreans needed to live in caves.
The southern portion of the country (land) that was inhabited by the nation of Korea (people) was turned into a new state (South Korea) by the USA and purged of all people who would oppose them and their ideology. South Korea is ONLY separate because of an international legal fiction perpetrated by the US against the Korean people (the nation of Korea).
The leadership culture of the South was built entirely on subjugation to the US war machine. Leaders survived or failed or died based on their allegiance to the US military occupation. The transition from full occupation to what exists today is one of loosening the leash on a captive one inch at a time to confirm that the punishing dominance has had the desired effect - that effect being complete subjugation to the interests of the dominator.
You think the Korean people want US nukes on submarines in its waters? You think the Korean people want to have half of their homeland completely inaccessible to them? You think the Korean people want half of their people to be completely isolated from them? You think they like having the DMZ as an eternal reminder of the constant threat of readied lethal force directed at their own countrypersons?
One day, there will be one nation-state of Korea, and the division created by the imperialists will dissolve and the trauma of this period can begin to be integrated and healed by the Korean people, but it will not happen until the US loses its violent dominance over the Pacific region.
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Youre right on saying that the US is the only reason korea is partitioned tho
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Yes i imagine the compradores/chaebols are very happy with that arrangement. The 99% of the people, eh not so much.
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South korea was authotarian dictatorship from the beginning, before and after the korean war.
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bruh they live under a dictatorship 😂
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