While pundits can engage in endless debate over whether President Trump's sanctions forced North Korean dictator Kim Jung-un to the negotiating table or whether Kim's threat of firing nuclear weapons  at the United States forced Trump to the negotiating table, one thing that the mainstream commentators are ignoring is the discomforting fact that Korea remains none of the U.S. government's business.

Let's keep in mind that this is a civil war we are dealing with, no different in principle from America's civil war. The Korean civil war is no more the business of the U.S. government than the U.S. civil war was the business of the Korean government.

There is another discomforting fact that the pundits seem to ignore: The original U.S. intervention into the Korean civil war was illegal under our form of government. That's because under the U.S. form of constitutional government, the president and the Pentagon are prohibited by law from waging war against another nation-state without first securing a declaration of war against that nation-state.

It is undisputed that the U.S. government went to war against North Korea in 1950 without the congressional declaration of war required by the U.S. Constitution. That made the U.S. intervention into the conflict illegal under our form of government.

The presence of U.S. troops in South Korea today stems from that original illegal intervention. Their continued presence in Korea is the rotten fruit of the original illegal tree of U.S. intervention into a country's civil war that was never any of the U.S. government's business.

Back in 1950, President Truman and his newly established national-security establishment attempted to justify their intervention into Korea's civil war by saying that North Korea's attempt to militarily unify the country was part of a worldwide communist conspiracy to take over the United States and the rest of the world. If North Korea were permitted to unify the country under communist rule, U.S. officials said, it would be the first step in an ultimate Red takeover of the United States.

But it was all balderdash. Even if North Korea had prevailed in the conflict, that wouldn't have meant that the communists would soon be running the IRS. The Korean War was just a civil war, no different in principle from America's civil war, where President Lincoln's forces invaded the South to militarily unify the country.

By the way, President Johnson, the Pentagon, and the CIA would use the same argument they used in the Korean War to justify their intervention into Vietnam's civil war almost 15 years later. Once again waging war illegally without the constitutionally required congressional declaration of war, U.S. officials maintained that if the U.S. government failed to prevent North Vietnam from unifying the country under communist rule, other "dominoes" would begin falling to the worldwide communist conspiracy and America would end up turning Red.

Once again, it was all balderdash. Neither the civil war in Vietnam nor the civil war in Korea was ever a threat to the United States. American soldiers who died or were maimed in those interventions were not protecting the United States because the United States was never under any danger of falling to the Reds as a result of those two civil wars.