One can’t help but be amused at the slant of the western press in its reportage on the North Korean strident threats to fire a nuclear missile on somebody. Kim Jong Un is being portrayed as an unstable adolescent who is out of control.
The worrying thing about this of course is that while North Korea will not bomb South Korea, Japan, the Philippines or Taiwan, it may well be tempted to drop one on Guam, an American colony with its 10,000 troops. The concern is the unpredictable actions of a rogue state against an inept and foolhardy U.S. political foreign policy decision.
The not-so-amusing part of the latest so-called crisis is that, according to the USAF Pacific commander, it had been deliberately staged by the U.S.
Each year, for more than two decades, U.S.-South Korean war games have been held in March. Each year, North Korea has raged against the exercises – not unexpected, as the target of these so-called games is North Korea. This year, for the first time, the Yanks overflew the games with B-2 and B-52 nuclear capable bombers originating from Missouri. They dropped dummy bombs on a vacant island near the 38th parallel then returned home. This was done as a show of strength in reply to North Korea’s most recent nuclear testing.
Pyongyang, for its part, responded by threatening nuclear retaliation.
President Obama overplayed his hand. The Joint Chiefs of Staff meanwhile, must be ecstatic. Once more Korea, as it did more than 60 years ago, will act as a springboard to sustain the huge military industrial complex that now controls the U.S. Treasury.
In 1949, Congress was poised to cut the military budget as the Second World War was over. The Korean War started when the North Korean communist army crossed the 38th parallel. Influenced by the tragedy of appeasement toward the Nazi Party in Europe, and fearful of a domino effect of communist infiltration anywhere in the world, the U.S. military budget was tripled and has never looked back.
Now the same reaction can be expected from the fear of a global Chinese economic and military supremacy, and with reason. After all it was the Chinese that nearly brought the American led UN troops to their knees during the Korean War. The Yanks were stalled by China then and North Korea remains a menacing domino now.
For its part, North Korea does appear to be hurting. The latest round of UN sanctions has stopped trading of any new North Korean currency or bonds on the world market, prohibits any new banking transactions with any country, and stops trade in gold, precious metals and most of the industrial metals that North Korea produces from its mines and foundries. China, having agreed to the sanctions, is ignoring them.
So, North Korea will do what it has been doing for years. They surprised the Yanks with the ferocity of their reaction and await the re-opening of negotiations where they will, once again, get trade concessions and more free food from the rest of us in return for not inadvertently dropping a nuclear bomb on someone.
And China will lend us the money to do it.
Alan Murdock is a local pediatrician.
