Hollywood has remade Red Dawn, and the foreign-policy community is baffled. The 2012 remake updates the villains to North Korean troops—aided by Putin's Russia—who conquer large chunks of America with their warplanes, electromagnetic pulse machine, and use of anti-Wall Street propaganda.
It's a conceptually hilarious invasion premise and completely implausible. Three foreign policy experts weigh in on the remake:
* Lawrence Korb, former assistant secretary of defense to Ronald Reagan, and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress: "How are the North Koreans gonna get here? We're talking about thousands of miles. Did they stage an amphibious landing like we did in Normandy? Did they fly over? Each of the pilots in their air force only flies four hours each year! Their military is in terrible shape, they don't have enough fuel."
* Christopher Preble, VP for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute: "To pose the North Koreans as a credible threat to the continental United States is as ridiculous as the spectre of all-out alien invasion. Also, how exactly would they get from there to here??"
* Michael Mazza, research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute specializing in defense policy in the Asia-Pacific: "Obviously the premise is entirely ridiculous. There have neither the money nor the military capacity to reach us."
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