What If Everything We’re Being Told About U.S.-North Korea Tensions Is Wrong?
Op-Ed by James Holbrooks
ActivistPost.com
MAY 10, 2017
Ask and you shall receive. For weeks upon weeks on end, the American populace has watched Donald Trump and his administration, along with pundits in the corporate media, drone on about how China should step up its game in the effort to thwart North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. From the Washington Post on Tuesday:
A North Korean delegation will attend a large multilateral economic summit in Beijing next week, China’s Foreign Ministry announced Tuesday, underlining its reluctance to join American efforts to completely isolate the regime in Pyongyang.
The problem, of course, is that this isn’t the sanctioned tactic. When Trump and his crew said they wanted China to step up on North Korea, what they meant was they wanted China to join in on the sanctions and the international condemnation — in other words, the demonization of Kim Jong-un.
Take, for instance, the reaction of former vice president Joe Biden’s deputy national security advisor, Ely Ratnor, to news of China’s invitation to North Korea.
“Beijing publicly taking foot off gas on pressuring North Korea. Is this what Trump means when he says Xi is ‘doing an amazing job as a leader’?” Ratnor wrote on Twitter Tuesday.
Ratnor failed to note, however, that China has publicly stated all along that trying to muscle out Kim’s regime is the absolute wrong strategy, and that the diplomatic approach is the way to go.
And China isn’t alone.
Even among U.S. allies in the region, diplomatic negotiation is preferable to military confrontation. As of Tuesday, South Korea has a new president, Moon Jae-in, and he’s a man who agrees with China that the U.S. should back off with the warships and allow discussions to resume.
In fact, Moon says that under his leadership, South Korea should be the party leading talks with its neighbor to the north. It should also be noted that both Moon and China’s President Xi Jinping have said negotiations with North Korea will end before they even begin if the Hermit Kingdom doesn’t first agree to certain concessions on its nuclear program.
So here we have a global superpower offering an olive branch via an invitation to an economic summit and a new regional leader who has said, in effect, that his country is willing to take the responsibility of de-escalating tensions.
One might be forgiven for thinking the U.S. presence in Asia is no longer needed, even in the context of the mainstream narrative that’s been splashing across news feeds for those previously mentioned weeks upon weeks.
But the warships will stay. The aircraft carriers will stay. The joint annual military drills with allies in the region will continue. And the United States, as Donald Trump himself has said, will have a strong presence in Asia for a very long time.
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