About 10 days ago, I cautioned in the subscriber edition of Planet Waves (“And What Are We Attracting?”) that we were heading for what appeared at the time to be an imminent international confrontation of some kind. “It looks like some hotly polarized, extremely exaggerated international situation that pops up seemingly out of nowhere,” I wrote in that edition. We now have a clue what I was seeing in the chart: the situation that emerged between the two Koreas on Tuesday, Nov. 23.
Accounts as to what happened vary, but the result was that North Korea began shelling a military base on the South Korean island of Daeyeonpyeong, one of several islands collectively referred to as Yeonpyeong Island. North Korea stated that it had responded after the South had recklessly fired dozens of shells into North Korean territorial waters around Yonphyong Islet. Naturally, there are two sides to the story, though it seems unlikely that South Korea would start firing shells to the north ‘recklessly’. Anyway, the result is that we have one of the worst conditions between these two nations in decades.
MSBNC is reporting that the United States’ George Washington aircraft carrier battle group is on its way to the region. U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak, a former admiral who once commanded that carrier group, is saying he believes we’re deploying it to the region as much to be in a position to retaliate against the North as we are to be preventing the South from over-reacting. He said the chances of the situation escalating are “pretty darned low” if we handle things carefully and use China as an ally. China is the one country with any real influence over North Korea. (Notably, during the Vietnam War, China was working against the United States by financing North Vietnam. It truly is interesting how things change.) Sestak, a member of the House Armed Services Committee (an influential House of Representatives committee), said he believes that U.S. military resources are severely depleted by our involvement Iraq, and that we don’t have much left to handle a military situation on the Korean peninsula if push really comes to shove.