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America's strategic paralysis
h/t Gates of ViennaOn Thursday morning, for the second time in so many days, North Korea threatened to attack the US territory of Guam with nuclear weapons. Taken together with Pyongyang’s two intercontinental ballistic missile tests last month, and the US’s Defense Intelligence Agency’s acknowledgment this week that North Korea has the capacity to miniaturize nuclear bombs and so launch them as warheads on missiles, these threats propelled the US and the world into a nuclear crisis. ...Unfortunately, neither the State Department nor the US media seem to have noticed. Rather than consider the implications of North Korea’s threats and its nuclear capabilities, the major US media outlets and Donald Trump’s political opponents on both sides of the political aisle have opted instead to attack Trump. ...For his part, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told the media on Wednesday that Trump’s statement was not a threat to use force, per se. It was, rather, an attempt to speak to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in a language he can understand, "since he doesn’t seem to understand diplomatic language." Tillerson then said that the administration’s policy remains the policy of its predecessors. The US seeks to renew nuclear talks with North Korea if it will just step back from the brink. Last week Tillerson said that the US is not seeking to overthrow the Kim regime. This was an extraordinary unilateral concession to a regime that is developing the means to conduct nuclear strikes against US cities. What Tillerson’s statement along with the response of the media and Trump’s political opponents all make clear is that at a moment when the US is in critical need of a serious strategic discussion about North Korea, no such discussion is taking place. And North Korea is not the only threat that the foreign policy elite in Washington ‐ both in and out of government ‐ is failing to address realistically or responsibly. The absence of serious strategic discourse in the US is just as striking in everything related to Trump’s handling of the Iranian threat. Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2017-08-12 |
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