"Can you name an instance in which a totalitarian state has been starved into oblivion?"
No, because we've never tried it.
Reminiscent of an old Marxist saying that "real" Marxism has never been tried. The fact is that Soviet Russia had next to no trade with the outside world in the 1920's and 1930's, during the worst decades of the Leninist-Stalinist terror. China had no support from the West until the 1970's, through the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Cuba has been under US sanctions for 40 years. North Korea is known for good reason as the Hermit Kingdom. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia were only dislodged by a Vietnamese invasion.
Not only has the strangulation policy not had any unalloyed success--it has not enjoyed a shadow of a success.
Dealing with international threats requires thinking long-range, which means looking beyond narrow concerns of "rice shipments" and "selling nukes."
You're right, I'm obsessed by trivial, narrow concerns. Let me explain exactly how short-range my thinking here is: North Korea has, say, enough plutonium for 100 weapons, numbers that enable them to sell nuclear weapons to any cash-and-carry buyer and still have a North Korean nuclear deterrent. We cut off all aid and trade from the US, we even impose a blockade of the North's coasts, and the North keeps building bombs. The Islamic Nutburger Front deposits $1 billion into a North Korean offshore account. The North smuggles a finished bomb out through China, it is shipped to somewhere in Indonesia, where it is loaded on a container ship. (We would NOT know that that had happened.) A few weeks later, Seattle goes up in a nuclear fireball. That's where I see your policy taking us.
But I'm not thinking long-range. I'm not looking beyond the "narrow concern" of nuclear weapons in the hands of Islamic fanatics. Seattle may become a radioactive hole, but gosh darn it, we never sanctioned those North Korean bastards, before we nuked 'em good.
Didn't we Objectivists used to say something about a philosophy for living on earth, and a primary orientation to the facts of reality?
I'm sorry if I'm a little snippy. I just take offense at "selling nukes" to Islamic fanatics being dismissed as a "narrow concern."
No, because we've never tried it.
Reminiscent of an old Marxist saying that "real" Marxism has never been tried. The fact is that Soviet Russia had next to no trade with the outside world in the 1920's and 1930's, during the worst decades of the Leninist-Stalinist terror. China had no support from the West until the 1970's, through the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Cuba has been under US sanctions for 40 years. North Korea is known for good reason as the Hermit Kingdom. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia were only dislodged by a Vietnamese invasion.
Not only has the strangulation policy not had any unalloyed success--it has not enjoyed a shadow of a success.
Dealing with international threats requires thinking long-range, which means looking beyond narrow concerns of "rice shipments" and "selling nukes."
You're right, I'm obsessed by trivial, narrow concerns. Let me explain exactly how short-range my thinking here is: North Korea has, say, enough plutonium for 100 weapons, numbers that enable them to sell nuclear weapons to any cash-and-carry buyer and still have a North Korean nuclear deterrent. We cut off all aid and trade from the US, we even impose a blockade of the North's coasts, and the North keeps building bombs. The Islamic Nutburger Front deposits $1 billion into a North Korean offshore account. The North smuggles a finished bomb out through China, it is shipped to somewhere in Indonesia, where it is loaded on a container ship. (We would NOT know that that had happened.) A few weeks later, Seattle goes up in a nuclear fireball. That's where I see your policy taking us.
But I'm not thinking long-range. I'm not looking beyond the "narrow concern" of nuclear weapons in the hands of Islamic fanatics. Seattle may become a radioactive hole, but gosh darn it, we never sanctioned those North Korean bastards, before we nuked 'em good.
Didn't we Objectivists used to say something about a philosophy for living on earth, and a primary orientation to the facts of reality?
I'm sorry if I'm a little snippy. I just take offense at "selling nukes" to Islamic fanatics being dismissed as a "narrow concern."
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