Tillerson unveils strategy for avoiding Korean war
In the last several days, the menacing game of chicken between North Korea and the United States has intensified immensely, with potentially devastating outcomes.’
As a rapid-fire succession of ominous developments points toward conflict, we’re nonetheless hopeful time remains on the side of de-escalation of tensions. That can happen only if reason prevails over bluster and if serious global diplomacy replaces the already out-of-control war of words.
The stakes were raised considerably higher last Friday when North Korea, under the mischievous leadership of president Kim Jong Un, tested an intercontinental ballistic missile that for the first time appeared capable of reaching and striking the western two-thirds of the United States, according to analysts. The only roadblock standing in the way of an all-out Kim-commanded nuclear attack on the American mainland now appears to be the North’s inability to miniaturize and attach a nuclear warhead to one of those ICBMs, a capability that some project the Kim dynasty can achieve by early next year.
It also appears as if the U.S. already is preparing for the worst. Earlier this week, the U.S. Department of State implemented a travel ban to North Korea and ordered all American citizens living or working there out of the rogue nation no later than Sept. 1, citing dangers to their physical safety if they remain.
Those worrisome developments have been aggravated by volleys of unnecessary bombast, bluster and bullying by players on both sides of the Pacific.
Kim himself has called his recent flurry of missile tests “gifts to the American bastards.”
For his part, President Donald J. Trump unleashed a tweet attack on China for not doing enough to rein in its rogue ally and commented publicly that the U.S. “will handle” the crisis well, in characteristic detail-deficient Trumpian rhetoric.
Military action
Then on Tuesday, GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham suggested U.S. military action now stands as a foregone conclusion.
“There is a military option to destroy North Korea’s [missile] program and North Korea itself,” Graham said on NBC’s “Today” show. “If there’s going to be a war to stop them, it will be over there. If thousands die, they’re going to die over there; they’re not going to die here, and [Trump] told me that to my face.”
Unlike Graham and Trump, we’re hopeful the pendulum has not swung completely in the direction of a second Korean War with implications far more grave than the hundreds of thousands of lives lost in the first conflict of the early 1950s. Kim, however, seems to have no fears of finishing the job the North started six decades ago toward its ultimate goal of a reunited Korea under complete Communist rule.
And Graham’s seeming nonchalance of a battlefield limited to the Korean peninsula conveniently ignores the North’s easy capability to target the 50 million enemy residents of democratic South Korea or the 80,000 Americans in the Koreas and nearby Japan.
Fortunately, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson tamped down some of that dispiriting discourse this week, offering a much needed voice of reason. Tillerson said he would welcome dialogue with North Korea and emphasized the U.S. was not seeking regime change in Pyongyang. “We are not your enemy,” he emphasized.
Tillerson indeed made it clear the leadership of Kim Jong Un would not be threatened as long as the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea began to dismantle its growing nuclear arsenal.
From that firm base, progress must be built. It could begin with Kim agreeing to negotiations with Tillerson and representatives of other nations such as Japan, South Korea, China and Russia with keen interests in denuclearizing the North and de-escalating the crisis.
It could also include continued participation by peace-loving countries and the U.N. Security Council toward toughening economic sanctions, particularly by China.
None of that progress can happen, however, without a truce in the vitriolic verbal volleys among Kim, Trump and others.
To be sure, we hope our American president steps aside and lets the hopeful words and reasonable recommendations of his secretary of state guide the U.S. onto a path toward disarmament by Kim and off the road to catastrophic dangers that warfare guarantees.