“North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and and fury like the world has never seen. He has been very threatening, beyond a normal statement, and as I said, they will be met with fire, fury and frankly, power the likes of which the world has never seen before,” President Donald Trump said in referring to Kim Jong Un, supreme leader of North Korea.
Talk, and more talk when it comes to threats against North Korea’s ballistic and nuclear program from a long list of U. S. presidents. Reminds me of a scene in the movie True Grit when the bad guy Ned Pepper said to the good guy Rooster Cogburn: “I call that bold talk for a one-eyed fat man.” Albeit in this case it should be: Tough talk from a blind man with sight.
Is it time for military action against North Korea?
We need more than sanctions on Kim Jong Un and his despotic regime-destined to raze cities across America with his nuclear arsenal. Tough talk hasn’t deterred him yet. Soon they will build a new and improved long range missile and before you know, its deja vu all over again.
I wasn’t around when we flattened Nagasaki and Hiroshima with a catastrophic Atomic bomb to end WWII. And I don’t want to be around when Kim Jung returns the favor as he maps U.S. cities on his list to receive first class nuclear attention.
But before that happens President Trump said he will put an end to Jong Un nuclear experiments if it takes inserting our military mite, but he would prefer dialogue, including sanctions to stop his nuclear ambitions. Recently he fired an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile that has the western world up in arms about applying more than sanctions. The Communist country accrued about $3 billion dollars in annual export revenues last year, with new sanctions it could still attained about 25 percent less revenues.
Most of the export is in mining, services and fisheries and China is its largest trading partner. Last year China imported nearly 90% of all North Korea’s export, and yet they support the idea of applying pressure on it’s friendly neighbor. America can’t count on the Chinese to apply pressure on Jong Un because in the end they will not let their brothers starve or freeze in the dark.
If isolation doesn’t work we have to do more than apply financial pressure. We should strongly consider going in and institute regime change or at least give the impression we will. But that would only increase tensions in an already volatile area, as the Japanese and South Koreans are loathed by China and North Korea.
In July of 2016 President Obama applied sanctions on Kim Jong Un, personally, and many top officials in his administration for human rights abuses and moving ahead with his ballistic and nuclear missile programs. It was a big hoorah about punishment for bad behavior, including forced labor and torture in the Korean Peninsular.
But the North Koreans survived that phase and also two bomb tests that didn’t sit well with the western world either. So now we are at the crossroads, and our options are: regime change in North Korea, or convince China to exit as their number one trading partner and apply hard sanctions.
hubiejones.com 