If you haven’t read A Republic, Not an Empire, you should. Eighteen years later and Pat’s thinking is still timely:

If the past is prologue, and it has proven to be, the future holds this. A renewal of ICBM tests until a missile is perfected. Occasional atrocities creating crises between the U.S. and North Korea. America being repeatedly dragged to the brink of a war we do not want to fight.

As Secretary of Defense James Mattis said Sunday, such a war would be “catastrophic. … A conflict in North Korea … would be probably the worst kind of fighting in most people’s lifetimes.”

When the lesson sinks in that a war on the peninsula would be a catastrophe, and a growing arsenal of North Korean ICBMs targeted on America is intolerable, the question must arise:

Why not move U.S. forces off the peninsula, let South Korean troops replace them, sell Seoul all the modern weapons it needs, and let Seoul build its own nuclear arsenal to deter the North?

Remove any incentive for Kim to attack us, except to invite his own suicide. And tell China: Halt Kim’s ICBM program, or we will help South Korea and Japan become nuclear powers like Britain and France.

Given the rising risk of our war guarantees, from the eastern Baltic to the Korean DMZ — and the paltry rewards of the American Imperium — we are being bled from Libya to Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen — a true America First foreign policy is going to become increasingly attractive.

Kim’s credible threat to one day be able to nuke a U.S. city is going to concentrate American minds wonderfully.

Here the best common sense solution is also the easiest. Sadly, common sense usually doesn’t coalesce until after an Empire falls and fades away. Ask Gibbon.

There was a recent glimmer of hope on a related matter: privatizing the war in Afghanistan (still fighting 16 years later, you know). But it was a false hope. Rather than a privateering program like the one that withstood the British Navy during the Revolution, they propose a mass extension of, a monopoly trust system for, the corporate welfare. More imperial faliure awaits.

And all the while, as we chase phantoms in places we don’t belong, the enemy within our own nations Aloha Snackbars away. Again and again.

Reuters.

Always from within, never without.