A “Sane” Voice in the Trump/Pence Regime Says Time “Running Out” for Non-military Resolution to Clash with North Korea
What Will YOU Do in the Face of This Horrific Threat to Humanity?
January 6, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
In mid-December, H.R. McMaster—Trump’s national security advisor—said in an interview with the BBC that “we’re running out of time” for a non-military “resolution” to the confrontation with North Korea. Asked whether he was committed to a “peaceful resolution,” McMaster said, “We’re committed to a resolution. We want the resolution to be peaceful, but as the president has said, all options are on the table. And we have to be prepared if necessary to compel the denuclearization of North Korea without the cooperation of that regime.”
Note well several alarming points here. One, when McMaster says that “all options are on the table” and that the U.S. is prepared to “compel the denuclearization of North Korea,” that is an unequivocal threat of war. A war by an imperialist superpower armed with thousands of nuclear weapons against a small country whose leadership has developed a few nukes in the hopes of deterring such an attack. A war certain to cause enormous destruction and loss of life in the Korean peninsula and the whole region, with hundreds of thousands killed quickly and possibly millions more, especially if nuclear weapons are used.
Two, McMaster warns that the U.S. may launch this war in the near future—“we’re running out of time.”
Three, this blood-curdling war mongering is coming from one of the supposedly “sane” voices in the Trump/Pence regime, a general with credentials as a “warrior scholar” in establishment circles. McMaster’s “sane” threats go hand in hand with Trump’s incendiary rants, like his tweet on the second day of the New Year that he had a “much bigger & more powerful” nuclear button than Kim Jong-un of North Korea.
What all this adds up to is that the U.S. is clearly preparing to move, possibly soon, against North Korea in ways that would be a towering injustice and horrific crime, of such a character and magnitude that words cannot do justice in capturing it. But beyond that, such a move by the U.S. would throw the very survival of humanity in the balance—an American attack could quickly spiral into even larger warfare across Asia and beyond.
Counting on the Democrats to stop this horror is willful ignorance of reality—and an immoral refusal to act in the interests of humanity. The Democrats have done nothing to prevent the Trump/Pence regime’s increasingly belligerent moves toward war, and in fact have egged on such moves in some ways. Asked in November whether she would support a U.S. ground invasion of North Korea, Nancy Piglosi (aka Pelosi) said, “We have to exhaust every other remedy. North Korea’s behavior has to be stopped, reversed—they cannot have a nuclear weapon.” Shmuck Fumer (aka Chuck Schumer) has pushed Trump to block Chinese investments in the U.S. to pressure China “to help rein in North Korea’s threatening and destabilizing behavior.”
How are these statements by top Democrats any different in substance from McMaster’s cold-blooded threats against North Korea? The powers that be on “both sides of the aisle”—from the Trump/Pence regime to Obama and the Democrats to the military and the “national security” establishment—all deem as unacceptable the development of nuclear capabilities by the North Korean regime. They fear it is changing the “balance of power” in this critical region of the world and constraining the ability of the U.S. to exercise imperialist domination. (See “Why Do the U.S. Rulers Consider North Korea ‘Dangerous’—and What Does That Say About the Danger of the Trump/Pence Regime to Humanity?”.)
The nightmarish trajectory plunging the world toward a criminal war with horrific consequences for humanity will not be stopped by “sane” voices in the regime or by the Democrats, and certainly not by any god up in the skies. It is on us—those in this country who are aware of the huge and urgent stakes for humanity involved here—to go far and wide to bring to people the real nature of what is going on (through things like taking out the revcom quiz on North Korea to campuses and elsewhere) and to win people to ACT on this.
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