Peace on Korean Peninsula Is the Last Thing Washington Wants
John Wight
SputnikNews.com
29.05.2018
The peace process underway on the Korean Peninsula is taking place in spite of Washington and not because. Indeed given the military-strategic importance of South Korea to Washington’s driving objective of full spectrum dominance, peace and reconciliation between North and South are about the last thing the Empire wants.
The willingness and determination of North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in to proceed in effecting the normalisation of relations undaunted by the Trump administration’s clear attempts to sabotage their efforts — issuing threats and insults against the North Korean leader, making outrageous demands of Pyongyang as a precondition to holding talks, pulling out of the first scheduled peace summit in Singapore on spurious grounds — is testament to their respective people’s desire for reconciliation after decades of strife.
Neocon hawks and US hard power
With neocon hawks such as John Bolton, Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley occupying key positions within the Trump administration, we have ourselves a White House which is wedded to the belief that diplomacy is for wimps, and that US hard power rather than diplomacy or even international law is the rightful arbiter of international affairs.
On the question of why Washington would be so keen to see the peace process on the Korean Peninsula collapse, the answer is simple: China. It is Beijing rather than Pyongyang occupying prime real estate in the minds of neocons and strategic planners in the US. The need to contain an economy rapidly gaining ground on its US counterpart, along with Beijing’s regional and increasingly global heft and reach, strikes fear in their hearts. It poses a challenge to the Empire’s hegemony, hence the strategic importance of the significant US military presence in and around the Korean Peninsula within striking distance of China.
Investigative journalist John Pilger, in his 2016 documentary ‘The Coming War With China’, issues a compelling and chilling warning of impending conflict in line with the aforementioned US hegemonic objectives. He writes:
“Today, more than 400 American military bases encircle China with missiles, bombers, warships and, above all, nuclear weapons. From Australia north through the Pacific to Japan, Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India, the bases form, says one US strategist, ‘the perfect noose’.”
Obama’s pivot to Asia
This ‘noose’ around China has been put in place as part of a US strategic and military objective predating the Trump administration. His predecessor Barack Obama’s key foreign policy demarche back in 2011 — his ‘pivot to Asia’ — was explicitly undertaken with the containment of Beijing in mind. In the speech he gave in Australia, outlining Washington’s ‘pivot to Asia’, Obama declared:
“The United States is a Pacific power, and we are here to stay”.
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