So, you really, really don’t like North Korea, do you?
I’m just glad to have done my small part:
North Korea has topped the list of countries that the American people feel most unfavorable toward, a biennial survey showed Monday, amid the communist nation’s prolonged detention of three U.S. citizens.
North Korea received a favorability rating of 23 points out of 100 in the Chicago Council on Global Affairs survey conducted on 2,108 adults from May 6-29. The North was followed by Iran with a rating of 27 points, Iraq with 31 points, Pakistan with 33 points and Russia 36 points. [Yonhap]
Also interesting: just 47% of Americans think U.S. troops should be “used” (Yonhap’s word) if North Korea invades South Korea, compared to 51% who were opposed. Even that is a significant recovery from 22% support in 1982, when memories of Vietnam were relatively fresh. It’s nearly unchanged since 2004, just after the peak of the anti-American fad in South Korea.
Also, it would be a completely meaningless statistic as soon as the first shots were fired. Even my views on that question are very, very complicated, and they would also be subject to dramatic shifts, depending on what the next South Korean government is like.
Yonhap also points to high levels of support for diplomacy with North Korea, but doesn’t mention that the use of targeted sanctions also enjoys overwhelming support. (The study didn’t measure support for sanctions against North Korea specifically, but in the case of Iran, support for both talks and sanctions was stratospheric.)
The original report is here, although I tend to wonder if it’s already been overcome by the shock of recent events and the collapse of President Obama’s mandate for “retrenchment,” as the CCGA describes it.
The study was funded, in part, by our friends at The Korea Foundation.
I’m sceptical that the United States would even support the South with ground troops straight away should the North invade. If anything there would be that period where the South is on its own in having to deal with any invasion. Sure you’d probably get American airstrikes, but in a ground war you need more than that.
It’s all political in this day and age. No one wants a long drawn out Iraq style conflict. For arguments sake you would need to do more than repel any ground invasion, I would argue you’d need to put troops in the North and force a cease fire.