The most surprising part about Donald Trump’s Wednesday speech, directed at the North Korean regime via Tokyo, is that more people of a certain type weren’t gushing over it. After all, if sending cruise missiles at Syria makes a man presidential, condemning North Korea accurately as “a hell that no person deserves” and sounding vaguely concerned about its miserable treatment of its civilians should make Trump worthy of Mr. Rushmore Trump is locked into an eternal squabble with Kim. This is nothing new for the United States – we’ve been messing with Korea for 70 years. On the other hand, Trump is usually a blowhard almost in the manner that the Kim family tends to be. Trump hasn’t released any dramatic videos of what it would like if the US nuked North Korea, but he’s done the American version – constantly threatening terrible things towards a nation that has had a victim complex since its inception, as well as delivering goofy schoolyard insults like ‘little rocketman’ at a regime that clearly believes that it is to its benefit to acquire and keep nuclear weapons. Never mind his vague nods to anti-interventionism on the campaign trail. Trump started his presidency by enthusiastically bombing the same countries his predecessors did. Now, Trump truly joined the American Empire family with his summer speech to the UN, in which he declared that the US “may have no choice but to totally destroy” North Korea if it does not behave. America remains in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, and myriad other locations across the globe. However, the question of the summer, and now the fall continues to be whether the US will proceed farther into a war with North Korea. Threats have been passed back and forth between the two nations. The US has instituted new sanctions and demanded that China put their back into making sure they stick, even while they are horrified by Trump’s ‘unhelpful’ speech. Fox News’ Ralph Peters, for one, thinks ‘moral relativism’ is another term for hesitation when it comes to preemptive war. Every-war cheerleader John Bolton is down to attack North Korea, because you have to give up on diplomacy and start murdering eventually. And lawyer-for-any-kind-of-empire-the-emperor-mandates John Yoo is also concerned about a lack of war. North Korea is a concerning place–but so are the people stamping and puffing in anticipation of a fight with it. Furthermore, every war, or precursor to war such as sanctions, punishes the downtrodden, and irritates the powerful and oppressive. Action against North Korea would be no exception to this rule. The only way to help the people of North Korea is to admit refugees to the US, and to fund worthy organizations such as Liberty in North Korea, which helps feed, clothe, and relocate people who have fled the country. The US has in the past tried to use humanitarian aid to North Korea as a carrot and stick for the nation to fall into line, However, leaders in Pyongyang and DC have something in common–they don’t care about the people of North Korea. That’s certainly not their priority. The majority of the 25 million North Koreans are stuck in a police-slave state, with a recent history of catastrophic famines. America’s goal is to constrain the current iteration of the Kim dynasty, and to prevent the acquisition of a functioning nuclear program. Almost nobody on earth is excited by the prospect of nuclear North Korea. But it’s equally essential to be alarmed by the prospect of nuclear weapons, or warfare, period. This is to say nothing of a country where more than 100,000 people are stuck in concentration camps. This article has been excerpted from: ‘Flirting With War in North Korea.’ Courtesy: Counterpunch.org
