Jordan Karla blog 1

The blog that I read is the Defcon Hill defense blog, in which the author, Jeremy Herb, analyzes and critiques Obama’s “containment” policy toward the nation of North Korea. The North Koreans have posed a problem to the rest of the world for decades, and the United States has been trying to contain their communist regime and ideology from spreading to any other country generally, and the United States in particular. The article particularly addresses one of Obama’s agreements with the North Koreans that entailed the following: The United States would send food aid to North Korea if Pyongyan (capital of North Korea) would suspend its nuclear testing. The North Koreans have over and over again in the past proven that they are not trustworthy, and are dangerous people yet Obama is applying a light handed appeasement type of agreement to try and contain any sort of outbreak or act of violence from them. Surely enough, two months after the fact, the North Koreans launched a missile. Mitt Romney, as cited in the blog, said “At the same time, he has cut critical U.S. missile defense programs and continues to underfund them” This to me, brings about the question: why in the world would we be cutting funding towards defense for things that it would appear, that we may need the most? With the election right around the corner, and Obama’s foreign policy sector being a strong point as viewed by many, the setbacks that keep occurring with North Korea could really end up hurting him, especially if the republicans milk the passivity that he is showing, because honestly, it’s really easy to defend the claim that he is not doing enough to deal with the North Koreans (do you think he is doing enough in this department?). In the instance with the North Koreans, while containment may be the easiest way to deal with them, any sort of appeasement policy that we direct toward them will more than likely be short lived as by nature, the North Korean government is extremely aggressive (particularly so when talking about the subject of military or similar arms topics) and will not very easily be deferred from whatever sort of testing or launching that they want to do. Dependent of this, the people of North Korea are experiencing one of the finest examples of containment within their own country. They are extremely cut off from the rest of the world, and basically receive absolutely no outside intelligence about the world around them. Everything is so highly regulated in that country that the people there don’t even know enough about the rest of the world (making generalizations) to think that their country may or may not be doing something wrong. That is why their leaders are praised as gods, and when their most recent leader died, literally just about everyone there was hysterical and terribly upset over his death, even though he was one of the worst dictatorial figures of the modern world, and created living conditions for his citizens that were minimalist at best. This blog really does a nice job of highlighting of the attempted and failed containment employed against North Korea and serves to enlighten that more needs to be done before things get really out of hand.

Blog analyzed:  http://thehill.com/blogs/defcon-hill/policy-and-strategy/221363-north-korea-missile-launch-could-weaken-obamas-foreign-policy-strength