It’s been a few months since the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan proved former Defense Secretary Robert Gates wasn’t kidding when he said President Joe Biden has been on the wrong side of every major foreign policy decision he’s ever made.
The withdrawal gave China, arguably the United States’ greatest global adversary, an opening to expand its influence in Asia, though you’d never know it if you followed the mainstream media. The mainstream media act like we left Afghanistan years ago, not months ago, and we’d be better just to forget all about it.
Unfortunately, there’s another rising threat in Asia that U.S. policy could greatly impact that the media is treating in much the same way. It centers around a war the United States has been involved with even longer than Afghanistan; namely, the armistice between North and South Korea.
If you ask anyone born after 1980, it’s entirely possible they won’t know that the Korean War is technically still ongoing. They may know that we still have just shy of 30,000 troops in South Korea, but we have military bases all over the world and the armistice was signed in the 1950s—long before the current crop of millennials were even a twinkle in their parents’ eyes.
It’s important at this point in time to educate anyone fuzzy on the details of the ceasefire, as there’s a bill quietly working its way through the House of Representatives—H.R. 3446—that would officially put an end to the Korean War. If you think that sounds good on its face, you’ll probably change your mind after watching “How a Bill in the U.S. Congress Could Influence the Spread of Communism in Asia.”
There are always those voices in the United States who insist we shouldn’t have soldiers stationed anywhere overseas, but they should consider South Korea an exception. As Loudon explains, ending the Korean War means the United States would pull our troops out, leaving the South completely exposed to invasion from the North, which, in case anyone has forgotten, is desperate to build nuclear weapons. It would also lift U.S. sanctions on North Korea, allowing massive capital to flow into its struggling economy and breathe new life into the communist regime running the country.
It’s also very possible that without U.S. forces on the ground, China would absorb South Korea before the North had a chance to invade. China has been threatening everyone in the region for a while now, including India, Taiwan, and Japan. If the war ends and the United States withdraws, there’s nothing to stop China from taking over South Korea if North Korea doesn’t get to it first.
South Korea may be a long way away from the United States, but it is one of our allies in a region of the world growing increasingly unstable. Loudon reminds any viewer who doesn’t think reunification of the North and South into one Korea is a very big deal that this wouldn’t result in two Koreas intermingling harmoniously. North Korea would impose communism on South Korea, either through political means or by force, and with one less democracy in the region China will be emboldened even further.
Japan has grown ever more nervous as China ramps up its overt threats across Asia, and every day Taiwan becomes more of a sitting duck. Since Taiwan is where basically the entire world gets its superconductors, every country would be in serious trouble if China invades Taiwan.
As far as Japan goes, Loudon points out that they can’t exactly start producing nuclear weapons overnight to protect themselves if Taiwan or South Korea fall into the hands of the Chinese Communist Party. South Korea could be just one in a series of dominoes toppling to communism if H.R. 3446 passes, and the United States could lose three allies in the region in rapid succession.
These concerns may sound slightly hysterical to anyone who hasn’t spent much time thinking about geopolitics, but Loudon is clearly following the outcome of ending the Korean War to its logical conclusion.
There are people both within the United States and South Korea that do not have the South’s best interests at heart when it comes to shaping policy, and Loudon knows who they are. Multiple organizations in the United States are pro-North Korea, and the current president of South Korea, Moon Jae-in, took part in violent, pro-communist uprisings in South Korea in the 1980s when he was a college student. Moon Jae-in was even jailed for participating in these uprisings, which the military needed to suppress. Loudon likens him to President Barack Obama, as he’s surrounded himself with leftists who have a pro-North Korean bent, has been working to suppress the media in South Korea, has gone after some military members who oppose him, and is doing everything in his power to turn South Korea into a one-party state. It’s all frighteningly familiar to what is happening in the United States under the current administration, but at least we don’t have Canada licking its chops just waiting to invade us.
Moon Jae-in isn’t the only one Loudon is worried about. Yoon Han Bong was also involved in the uprisings in the 1980s, but while Moon Jae-in ended up in jail, Yoon Han Bong ended up in the United States, where he began founding various pro-North Korea groups throughout the country. Most of these groups are still in existence and work together under a kind of umbrella group called NAKASEC, the National Korean American Service & Education Consortium. This organization lobbies members of Congress, pushing programs that would benefit North Korea without being openly pro-North.
Loudon also discusses a second, separate pro-North organization called NoDutDol based in New York, which has ties to members of Asian Americans for Equality, a workers organization that came out of the communist party in the 1980s. NoDutDol regularly arranges visits to North Korea, and along with the other organizations Loudon lists, has created numerous pro-North organizations across the United States.
Loudon then shifts to Women Across DMZ and their leader, Christine Ahn, who has allegedly been a pro-North activist in the United States for nearly two decades. She’s worked extensively with NoDutDol and knows how to work the media by putting a kinder, gentler face on North Korean advocacy through organizing groups of women, including Americans and Canadians, to pull off publicity stunts like walking across the demilitarized zone (DMZ) from South Korea into North Korea. They get lots of photo ops on top of making communism look not so bad. She has ties to Pak Chol, who has been a North Korean intelligence officer for many years. He helped her coordinate her 2015 women’s march across the DMZ.
Loudon can’t stop yet, because there’s still the Korean American Political Action Committee (KAPAC), the National Unification Advisory Council, and the many, many congress members sponsoring H.R. 3446 who are allegedly cozy with pro-North Korea activists. It likely won’t come as a shock to anyone that the members sponsoring H.R. 3446 are all Democrats, with the exception of one Republican. Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz) is a reliable conservative, and Loudon surmises that Biggs has signed on with no awareness of the machinations of his Democratic counterparts and the activists influencing them. He thinks it’s likely Biggs is looking at this as a way to bring American soldiers home from a country where Biggs thinks we don’t belong, and urges Biggs to reconsider giving his support to such a dangerous bill.
Loudon closes the episode likening the potential loss of South Korea to allowing the Germans to keep France or Great Britain during WWII. Though an exhaustive number of comparisons to Nazi Germany have been made in the last five years or so, in this instance it feels more than appropriate.
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