This is a good point. There are definite parallels between the way we handled the Indians after the American Revolution and the way we are handling our enemies today, especially our Muslim enemies. Sadly our Indian policy was started by George Washington himself who looked upon the Indians as a type of ‘noble savages’ largely from his experiences with then as a young man.

And it goes back further than Kim Jong Il: The Korean War is still not technically over, because we feared an encounter with a million Chinese and accepted a perpetual “armistice.” Perhaps at the time it was a good idea to back off, but that was before the modern military and its use of technological force multipliers and automata. Today, all of China’s millions of soldiers would be routed by a properly trained and integrated force of a few hundred marines, soldiers, sailors, and airmen. We just don’t have the balls/conviction to stand up and say “OK, that’s the end of it. Unconditional surrender or we move.”

In fact, it goes back even further. Right now there are Native American tribes trying to govern themselves under a tangled patchwork of federal exceptions and precedences because it was deemed cheaper and/or more expedient, 100-150 years ago, to entreat and cede sovereignty with some of the tribes rather than conquering them as we did others. Ed Cline put it best in the “Sparrowhawk” series: the solution was to subsume the tribes into American civilization, not to maintain them in thousand-acre specimen jars throughout Oklahoma, NM, and AZ. Canada is partly doing it better than we did and partly doing it worse. By not having the fortitude to say “this is how it’s going to be,” we created a quagmire of sovereignty. (Full disclosure: I have partial NA ancestry).

Robert A. Heinlein was right: the application of force is virtually always the most effective manner in which to resolve conflicts.

The world turned upside down.