I learned something new today that Hawaii and Guam are not covered by the NATO alliance simply because none of their landmasses touch the Atlantic Ocean:
Sweden became the newest member of NATO earlier this month, joining 31 nations in the security alliance, including the United States. Well, make that 49 of the 50 United States.
Because in a quirk of geography and history, Hawaii is not technically covered by the NATO pact.
If a foreign power attacked Hawaii – say the US Navy’s base at Pearl Harbor or the headquarters of the Indo-Pacific Command northwest of Honolulu – the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization would not be obligated to rise to the Aloha State’s defense.
CNN
Here is why Hawaii and Guam being left out is significant:
John Hemmings, senior director of the Indo-Pacific Foreign and Security Policy Program at the Pacific Forum, says Hawaii’s exclusion from NATO removes “an element of deterrence” when it comes to the possibility of a Chinese strike on Hawaii in support of any potential Taiwan campaign.
Leaving Hawaii out lets Beijing know that NATO’s European members potentially have a bit of an “escape clause” when it comes to defending US territory in such a hypothetical situation, he says. (……)
Hemmings also makes an argument for Guam, the US Pacific island territory some 3,000 miles farther west than Hawaii, to be included in NATO’s umbrella.
The island, which has long been a focal point of North Korean saber rattling, is home to Andersen Air Force Base, from which the US can launch its B-1, B-2 and B-52 bombers across the Indo-Pacific.
Hemmings likens Guam’s exclusion from NATO to how the US left the Korean Peninsula outside of a line it drew across the Pacific to deter the Soviet Union and China from spreading communism in January 1950. Five months after the so-called Acheson Line was drawn, the Korean War began.
“The adversary feels emboldened to carry out military conflict and you end up having a war anyway,” Hemmings says.
You can read more at the link, but is anyone confident that NATO would respond for example to a Chinese attack on Guam in response to a Taiwan contingency? Other than the UK and likely Canada who else in NATO could be trusted to deploy troops to the Pacific to support such a conflict?
Here are some interesting survey results about the prestige of certain professions. In Korea, China, and Japan lawmakers have the highest level of prestige, however in the U.S. and Germany lawmakers rank very low according to this survey:
Individuals from South Korea, China, and Japan perceive lawmakers as holding the highest societal status job, whereas those from the United States and Germany consider firefighters to have the highest social status, according to survey results released Sunday.
The Korea Research Institute for Vocational Education and Training conducted the survey from July to August 2023. The survey involved 7,500 employed individuals aged between 18 to 64 across five different countries: South Korea, China, Germany, Japan and the US.
Researchers identified 15 occupations spanning diverse sectors and requested respondents to evaluate the societal status of each profession using a five-point scale, ranging from “very low” to “very high.”
The 15 jobs included lawmaker, pharmacist, middle and high school teacher, small business executive, mechanical engineer, software developer, bank teller, factory worker, restaurant employee, construction day laborer, social worker, firefighter, artificial intelligence expert, movie director and digital content creator.
According to KRIVET, the perception of prestige associated with specific occupations also varies depending on the nationalities of the survey respondents.
Korean nationals assigned the highest occupational prestige, scoring 4.16 points, to lawmakers, followed by pharmacists and artificial intelligence experts, respectively marking 3.83 and 3.67 points. In contrast, factory workers, restaurant employees, and construction day laborers were ranked the lowest, ranging between 1.86 to 2.19 points.
Japanese and Chinese respondents also answered that lawmakers held the highest occupational prestige, with 3.59 points and 4.22 points respectively, followed by pharmacists in Japan and movie directors in China.
Unlike the three Asian countries, respondents from Germany and the US answered that firefighters held the highest occupational prestige, followed by software developers. In Korea, firefighters were ranked 11th in their level of prestige. Lawmakers were ranked 12th in the US and 10th in Germany.
Korea Herald
You can read more at the link, but considering all the partisanship and how poorly the U.S. Congress performs it is no surprise they rank so lowly by Americans surveyed in this poll. This survey however would have been more interesting if they included military personnel. Would military personnel have outranked firemen?
South Korea’s National Intelligence Service is one of the suspects of who was the overall mastermind of a prostitution ring that specialized in servicing people who work for the government or defense industry:
The two brothels in Virginia (referred to in the affidavit as ‘Target Locations 8 and 9’) were situated in Unit 245 at the Avalon Mosaic in the quiet suburban town of Fairfax and Unit 649 of the nearby Hanover Tysons
Intelligence experts are becoming increasingly convinced that six high end brothels in the suburbs of Boston and Washington, D.C. were set up by a foreign nation as an espionage ‘honeytrap’.
They believe the brothels – allegedly masterminded by a 41-year-old South Korean woman – targeted politicians, high ranking government officials and defense contractors.
But the mystery is which country was behind the scheme. Russia, China, Korea itself, or even Israel are al seen as possibly being behind the scheme.
‘Having the Koreans out front could have been a false flag to give China or another country plausible deniability if the plot unraveled,’ a one-time CIA senior operations officer told DailyMail.com in an exclusive interview.
Daily Mail
Considering how stupid the people going to this brothel are they probably shouldn’t be working any where near the government:
Aspiring clients had to submit a membership application before they could book an appointment.
Required documentation included government-issued ID, phone and email contacts, employer information and credit card records, according to court records.
Bizarrely, numerous political, military and business officials provided it all without blinking an eye and proceeded to have sex in an apartment that for all they knew was outfitted with equipment to record video and audio footage.
‘Finding idiots like this would be pure gold for an intelligence service running a honeypot,’ said the retired foreign spy.
A retired CIA senior operations officer was equally flabbergasted.
‘This is at the level of a Nigerian prince scam,’ she said.
You can read much more at the link, to include a number of pictures of the prostitutes. Judging by the pictures these were some high-end Korean prostitutes working for this ring. Would China be able to recruit this many South Korean women to work for them? It seems more likely that the ROK NIS would be able to pull this off and according to the article ROK intelligence has attempted honeypot operations in the past to collect intelligence. It will be interesting if we will ever hear who was actually behind this honeypot operation.
