China's foreign ministry said today that the United States should remember the Korean situation is not a computer game. This thoughtful insight is sure to make the State Department counterparts scramble for new ideas about how to handle the Korean situation, absent the game theory of traditional war games. Or not.
The problem for the US is that it isn't a computer game, and we seem to know that better than China. North Korea postures and speculates on a future where nuclear weapons are dropped on the coastal areas of our country. We must suppose that the Chinese take this seriously, but are doing little substantively to stop it. It serves their purpose. We know that part is not a computer game.
If you run the scenarios of missile launch and intercept enough times, it seems like a computer game. Because missiles do not take long to get to the target, you get to replay them quite a few times in a day. Each one has an outcome that is scary, and these are simple compared to the war gaming scenarios that involve several countries that are affected. We do these kinds of scenarios because they are considered to be the most likely ones that will happen. Unless China and North Korea are bluffing, we better practice what we do in response. That isn't a computer game.
Because the North has fired a missile over Japan - again - we have another country involved, pushing for a better solution to these kind of provocative actions. When you send people running for shelter in the middle of the day, that does not sit well with the population. That isn't a computer game.
There might be a few in the world who think we should be grateful to the Chinese for their insight, but on this one they are flat wrong. This isn't a computer game.
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