Fifty-seven years after that armistice, a U.S. carrier task force is steaming toward the Yellow Sea in a show of force after the North fired 80 shells into a South Korean village.
We will stand by our Korean allies, says President Obama. And with a US security treaty and 28,000 U.S. troops in South Korea, many on the DMZ, we can do no other. But why, 60 years after the first Korean War, should Americans be the first to die in a second Korean War if it happens? Unlike 1950, South Korea is not an impoverished ex-colony of Japan. She is the largest of all the ``Asian tigers,'' a nation with twice the population and 40 times the economy of the North. Why, when the Cold War has been over for 20 years, do all these Cold War alliances still exist?
Obama has just returned from a Lisbon summit of NATO, an alliance formed in 1949 to defend Western Europe from Soviet tank armies on the other side of the Iron Curtain that threatened to roll to the Channel. Today, that Red Army no longer exists, the captive nations are free, and Russia's president was in Lisbon as an honored guest of NATO.
Yet yhe US still have tens of thousands of U.S. troops in the same bases they were in when Gen. Eisenhower became supreme allied commander more than 60 years ago.
For more: This is not the US quarrel - Other Views - MiamiHerald.com
We will stand by our Korean allies, says President Obama. And with a US security treaty and 28,000 U.S. troops in South Korea, many on the DMZ, we can do no other. But why, 60 years after the first Korean War, should Americans be the first to die in a second Korean War if it happens? Unlike 1950, South Korea is not an impoverished ex-colony of Japan. She is the largest of all the ``Asian tigers,'' a nation with twice the population and 40 times the economy of the North. Why, when the Cold War has been over for 20 years, do all these Cold War alliances still exist?
Obama has just returned from a Lisbon summit of NATO, an alliance formed in 1949 to defend Western Europe from Soviet tank armies on the other side of the Iron Curtain that threatened to roll to the Channel. Today, that Red Army no longer exists, the captive nations are free, and Russia's president was in Lisbon as an honored guest of NATO.
Yet yhe US still have tens of thousands of U.S. troops in the same bases they were in when Gen. Eisenhower became supreme allied commander more than 60 years ago.
For more: This is not the US quarrel - Other Views - MiamiHerald.com
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