Persona Non Grata- What to do about Kim
It’s a club that, truth be told, wants to cut off new membership.
The so-called “nuclear club” of nations who have “the bomb” has grown to the point of over-saturation. That “club” includes charter members – the United States, Russia (nee- Soviet Union), the United Kingdom, France and China, all signatories to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) which went into force in 1970. Since then, three more nations- nations who are not signatories to the NPT- have budged their way into “the club,” those being India, Pakistan and, most recently in 2006, North Korea.
That late entry into “the club” poses a unique problem, not only for its members but also, and even more so, for its non-nuclear neighbors- Japan and South Korea. It’s not only that Kim Jong-un has a nuclear bomb, nor is it that he is developing missile systems which are capable of delivering the bomb, but rather that he is just crazy enough to actually launch a nuclear attack- both on his neighbors and on the United States forces stationed in those neighboring countries. Worse, he is the only national leader ever to have officially and specifically threatened to attack the United States in its 240-year history. Not even Adolf Hitler nor, for that matter, the Imperial Japanese Empire (who actually attacked the naval and air bases in Pearl Harbor), nor the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, ever actually threatened to attack the United States, but Kim Jong-un has repeatedly threatened to launch a nuclear strike at the United States- something that his father, Kim Jong-Il, nor his grandfather and founder of North Korea, Kim Il-sung were ever insane enough to do.
Never mind the fact that his intermediate-range weapon-delivery systems aren’t entirely reliable and that his Inter-continental Ballistic Missile is still in development, Kim Jong-un has said that he intends to launch such an attack against the United States and, through the words of his envoy to the United Nations, Ja Song Nam, who yesterday warned that the United States is acting in such a way to bring about global thermo-nuclear war, is determined to do so, sometime in the not-quite-so-distant future.
That he has been able to proceed towards the capability to realize such a threat is the result of foolish miscalculations on the part of the United States. Heretofore, we have been repeatedly assured by the Chinese that they won’t allow the North Koreans to attain such capability- that and the fact that Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama all touted their own would-be success in bringing the North Koreans under control…
…yeah, some control. The millennial, corpulent communist Kim is on the very threshold of tying a nuclear weapon to an intermediate-range ballistic missile, and is not very far away from doing the same thing to an ICBM- one capable of reaching the west coast of the United States’ mainland.
Finally, the United States has indicated that enough is enough. Since Clinton’s “six-party framework” to reign in North Korea’s nuclear ambitions has proved to be nothing but a farce, and Obama’s “strategic patience” was nothing more than an excuse for ignoring the growing threat, President Donald Trump has indicated to the Chinese that he is very prepared and quite willing to launch a preventive strike against the North Koreans, if the Chinese fail to reign in the tubby tyrant who is headed towards annihilation.
Trump’s recent missile attack against the Syrian airbase, from which sarin gas attacks were launched by the Assad regime, and the dropping of a Multiple Ordinance Air Blast (MOAB- also euphemistically called the “Mother of all Bombs”) on ISIS tunnels in eastern Afghanistan, has also sent a clear message to both Iran and North Korea that, while they can hide their nuclear capabilities underground, we can still take them out if we need to, and are not afraid to do so should contingencies arise.
Therein lies the crux, and the passage of time is no friend to anyone- not to us, not to the Iranians, not to the North Koreans, nor to any of the nations in Asia or the Middle East. Doing merely what his predecessors did would only leave President Trump in a position of enabling our enemies, in both Iran and North Korea, to eventually attack the United States with nuclear weapons. The fact that Iran is continuing to develop nuclear weapons and strategic medium- and long-range missiles, despite the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) pushed through by Barack Obama, should surprise no one who lives in the real world. Obama was a fool to push for and sign onto such a deal, because it offers nothing to ensure that Iran won’t become the next member of the nuclear club.
The fact that Kim Jong-un has now become a thorn in the side of his Chinese allies doesn’t help, either. China needs favorable trade agreements with the United States, much more than they need trouble from the little boy who lives next door. There is even some talk now that the Chinese might send in a hit-squad, to enable Kim to join his father and grandfather. After all, it’s far better to eliminate one irrepressible and incorrigible mad man, than to allow him to bring on a disaster of untold proportions. The longer Kim stays in power, the closer the world comes to its nuclear nightmare, and we now have a president who finally sees the world for what it has actually become, rather than the world everyone wishes it was, instead.
We wait and watch.
-Drew Nickell, 18 April 2017
© 2017 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.
author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”
now available at Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Bending-Your-Ear-Collection-Essays/dp/1633932907?ie=UTF8&ref_=asap_bc
Signed and personalized editions now available at my website:
Follow my postings on the RSS feed: http://www.drewnickell.com/?feed=rss2