Comment by gpm
5 hours ago
It's not the lack of oil that enabled this. The west* fought a bloody war to defeat North Korea. We just didn't win (though we did prevent the north from taking the south...). Now you've got a dictatorship protected by their ability to deal devastating damage to South Korea via nukes, huge stockpiles of conventional artillery (and Seoul is within range), etc. Moreover one backed by a superpower (China, and before China the soviet union... indeed these countries are the reason the west didn't win the first war as well).
They could have all the oil in the world and we'd be no more in a position to do anything about it.
*US, Uk, Australia, Netherlands, Canada, France, New Zealand, Phillipines, Tukey, Thailand, South Africa, Greece, Belgum, Luxembourg, Ethopia, Columbia, and South Korea.
South Korea wouldn't exist as a prosperous Western-aligned liberal democracy without the war, so it was hardly a complete loss.
> South Korea wouldn't exist as a prosperous Western-aligned liberal democracy without the war
The first several decades after the war they were very much not a liberal democracy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_Democratic_Struggle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Republic_of_Korea).
We didn't win because China intervened in massive numbers to keep the regime in the North from losing the whole country.
The US did not win because the US did not win. Crying about the reasons does not help. Usual FAFO. Does not hurt to think of consequences before starting something
South Korea and its allies did not win - but they did successfully defeat the North Korean invasion of South Korea that started the war. Resulting in 53 million people today who live good lives in a high tech liberal democracy instead of living in abject poverty under the dictatorship that controls the north.
Despite not winning, the consequences of the western nations going to war in this case appear to have been significantly positive. It's really the only war since WWII that I think I can confidently say that about.
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