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Showing backbone on North Korea

3 min read
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Carl Haberl wrote an interesting piece on North Korea in the Aug. 27 edition, intoning that war should not be an option.

Regrettably, when dealing with the likes of Kim Jong-un, war, or at least the threat of annihilating war, must be an option, because in the end strongmen understand only one thing – overwhelming force.

Many presidents have tried and all have failed to rein in North Korea.

In fact, it is the fixed and accurate perception by the North that presidents, especially Barack Obama, talk tough but have no intention of being tough.

They knew what I knew: Obama was prepared to take no resolute action to prevent all the things he said we were opposed to happening. Read, acquire a nuclear weapon with a long-range, reliable delivery system.

The irony of all this is that this is precisely how the Korean War started. Dean Acheson, the secretary of state for President Harry S. Truman, repeatedly failed to mention that Korea was within the American defense perimeter and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, ever desirous of undermining U.S. power in Asia, gave the go-ahead for the invasion spearheaded by surplus T-34 tanks. The North Koreans spoiling for a fight, and anxious to forcibly reunite the two Koreas, unleashed the whirlwind. The United States, caught with its pants down, was forced to commit troops to oppose naked aggression at a time when the drawdown of military forces after World War II had reached ridiculous levels.

Haberl compounds his strategic shortsightedness by invoking President John F. Kennedy’s alleged brinksmanship in avoiding World War III in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

He fails to mention, of course, that Kennedy’s handling of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, compounded by a poor showing at his first summit meeting with Nikita Khrushchev, convinced Khrushchev that Kennedy was weak and indecisive. This led directly to the Soviet Union deploying nuclear missiles in Cuba. Thank God that by this time, another campaign promise of Kennedy’s had proved to be false: There was no missile gap, and the United States had overwhelming strategic superiority over the Soviets, and they knew it.

We also had another handy institution at the ready: The U.S. Navy.

I do credit Haberl’s observation that China is not going to bring the North Koreans to heel. It suits their strategy to counter the influence of the United States to support North Korea. This is why economic sanctions, the tool of a succession of presidents, are useless. The Chinese make suffocating sanctions impossible.

Which brings me to President Trump. All of a sudden a man of resolution strides onto the scene. He assesses the intentions of a dictator who is making wild threats about launching an ICBM at Guam and, guess what, he says, “Try it and you are gone.”

And by the way, if Kim reads The New York Times, he may actually believe that for the first time in a long time, an American president means what he says. It’s about time.

Steven R. Wolf

Washington

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