Mugwump wrote:David wrote:There is a de-escalation strategy available. Unfortunately, the US rejects it.
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News ... 502966370/
All the US can do is talk about more sanctions and more aggression. What if they used the existing sanctions as leverage, offering some economic relief if North Korea puts a halt to its nuclear program? What if the North Korean administration has other aims than causing a nuclear showdown? What would happen if Western powers put the macho "we don't negotiate with terrorists" rhetoric to one side and actually found a way to resolve this situation peacefully?
Before anyone wheels out the Neville Chamberlain analogies, North Korea isn't in a position to invade anyone. Things can't actually get much worse than they are at this point, short of an actual military confrontation. It's time to negotiate.
China's implied demand that the US cease military cooperation with its ally more or less proves that what we have here is a great power stand-off, with the Chinese using a proxy state to suppress the interests of the US in the region and separate the US from its South Korean ally. So far, so predictable. Last time I looked it was not the US actively threatening to use nuclear weapons or firing missiles over the territory of peaceable nations. It was North Korea. How you manage to make all that the US's fault and place the onus on the US to resolve it through niceness is beyond me.
On a second note, the entire point of sanctions is that they are imposed, or eased, in response to certain actions. These would readily be eased in NK started to denuclearise. You seem to be advocating unilateral easing, or failing to understand the very nature of sanctions. Good luck with that strategy. I am 99% sure it wil do nothing to alter NK's pursuit of the ultimate WMD.
We should not demonise China ; it is a rational power with valid interests, and little history of military imperialism. These things are to its credit. But all great powers are hegemonic, and China is a dictatorship with few cosy liberal principles. A world under Chinese hegemony is not one to be welcomed. North Korea is part of its power game.
On the contrary, I think we readily overlook the US's belligerence in the region. These shows of joint military strength that China is suggesting be put on hiatus have been apparently happening annually for 45 years, long before North Korea was any major threat to the world. South Korea, too, as much as it has become a vastly more modern, liberal and tolerable place to live since it threw off its own right-wing dictatorship, also refuses to recognise North Korea's sovereignty and retains an official position of taking the North back for itself. And of course there's the inconvenient history of the US and its allies killing over a million North Korean civilians and destroying much of Pyongyang during the Korean War.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Pyongyang
Painting just one side as the aggressors is an oversimplification. North Korea may be run by lunatics, but they are lunatics with at least some legitimate grievances and a not-altogether-unjustified desire for self-protection. If the US continues to ignore that and keeps on escalating tensions, then the range of diplomatic solutions will continue to shrink.
I'm not saying that only the US have responsibility here, by the way. But they are our allies, and we can, perhaps, encourage them to behave reasonably and talk them back from the brink of conflict. With North Korea, by now I think the approach can only start and end with harm minimisation. Putting pressure on China may be an option, but I fear that they have little more control over the situation than we do, however much they may have once had.
"Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence." – Julian Assange
