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+--- Thread: The U.S. chooses favorites: North Korea over South Korea (DIY spite?) (/thread-21201.html)
The U.S. chooses favorites: North Korea over South Korea (DIY spite?) - C C - Aug 27, 2026
Delayed by a week on YouTube.
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PETER ZEIHAN (geopolitics)
https://youtu.be/qjzqManP4hg
VIDEO EXCERPTS: I was just listening to the radio, and I had to pull over because I couldn’t believe it. I thought I was listening to some sort of satire radio, but no. Donald Trump is in the process of functionally ending the alliance with South Korea; specifically, the South Koreans and the United States have annual exercises to basically prepare for a North Korean invasion.
And Trump has largely ended U.S. participation in it, which is a long-standing North Korean propaganda demand. In his Truth Social post, Trump said a lot of bad things about South Korea, specifically called out Chairman Kim of North Korea, the despot, as one of his good friends and as a respectful leader and whew…
Three big things here. Number one. Bothers me that I have to say this out loud, but North Korea is not a friend. North Korea is literally pointing their nuclear weapons at us, and is one of the world’s greatest contributors of cybercrime, specifically crypto crime that disproportionately attacks Americans. So the idea that Trump has a personal relationship with the dictator Kim, and that is somehow benefiting the United States, is delusional at best.
Number two, yes, South Korea is a beneficiary of the United States. But I would argue in a post-globalized world, South Korea is one of the top five countries that we really, really want to have a strong relationship with. Once you get past the trade disputes that the Koreans and the Americans have, which were largely addressed by a free trade agreement negotiated by Trump 1.0.
There are two really big things that we need them for. Number one, South Korea is one of the world’s best shipbuilders, and the US Navy was relying upon Korean tech, Korean technicians, and Korean modules in order to jumpstart U.S. naval ship building. We can probably now kiss that goodbye, which means that the rate of building new ships is going to continue to be very slow.
The second piece is in computers. Everybody obsesses about GPUs, which are primarily the product of Taiwan, high-end processing nodes. People forget that you also need something called DRAM, dynamic random access memory. It’s a high-end memory chip, and the Koreans make almost all of those, all the good ones anyway, and are really the only ones researching how to make better ones. So whereas Biden and now Trump are pushing to get GPUs produced in the United States, they have kind of forgotten about the other piece of high-end computing. And without the Koreans, that just goes away.
Third, yes, Korea is a security beneficiary, but they’re not a free rider. [...] So Trump called out in his Truth Social post about how the Koreans refused to assist in the denuclearization of Iran. [...] The South Koreans -- guess how many ships they have that can make it to the Strait of Hormuz? Zero. So, I mean, what were they supposed to do? Swim? ...
The U.S. chooses favorites: North Korea over South Korea ... https://youtu.be/qjzqManP4hg