Then There Were Four -- March 13, 2017

Updates

Later, 12:41 p.m. Central Time: a couple of hours after posting the original post below, The Drudge Report banner headline: US Navy simulates attack on NKorea.

Original Post 

Yesterday I added another region to the "on the brink" link at the sidebar at the right: NOKO-SOKO-Japan-China.

Today I see two new headlines over at Drudge:

• US deploys attack drones to South Korea
• Japan plans to send it largest warship to South China Sea 

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Expansion

I don't know how much folks are talking about this elsewhere and I've simply missed it. All these years I assumed the "Iron Curtain" came down in Germany because Reagan/Gorbachev made nice. That may have been 90% of it; it may have been 10% of it. Who knows/who knew? But at the end of the day,  one wonders whether it would have happened without the blessing of West Germany. It cost West Germany an incredible amount of money to absorb East Germany. But if one looks at this geopolitical event as a "corporate" merger or takeover, it made a lot of sense in the long run. West Germany, playing second fiddle to France and Great Britain had nowhere to expand.

Except in one direction. East. West Germany needed lebensraum and had nowhere to expand. The rest is history.

Take that analogy to current situation in South Korea. South Korea, even more than West Germany in the 1980s, is bursting at the seams. It cannot grow internally any more. Once you get past all the little, inconsequential countries, population density/square mile:

• Taiwan, 1,849
• UK, 650
• South Korea, 501
• Netherlands, 491
• Japan, 399
• Belgium, 343
• Israel, 319
• Germany, 235
• France, 100
• US, 84
• Russia, 22
• Canada, 3
• Australia, 2