When inexperienced diplomats get tired …
US Secretary of State Tillerson cut short his visit to S. Korea because of "fatigue," Korean officials tell Korea Herald.
They can get grumpy.
US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Friday declared that the existing “strategic patience” approach is over, saying all options including military action are on the table. …
“Let me be very clear: the policy of strategic patience has ended. We are exploring a new range of diplomatic, security, economic measures. All options are on the table.”
Tillerson isn’t just talking about military action, he’s talking up the possibility of making a preemptive attack on North Korea. It’s an option that’s being pressed by supposedly reasonable Republicans.
Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing last month that the United States has three choices: what he called “proactive regime change,” to topple Kim; sanctions and other coercive measures; or military cooperation with Japan and South Korea that could include a preemptive strike on missile facilities. “Otherwise, we’re staring down the barrel of an ICBM,” Corker said.
Two points: first, ICBMs don’t have barrels, second, Russia and China already have better than 2,000 missiles pointed our way and a handful more from North Korea doesn’t represent a serious increase in the threat to the nation. But our attitude about those weapons is a serious issue.
Especially to more than 20 million people in South Korea we can’t protect.
As part of a show of standing up to North Korea, the United States is in the midst of installing a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, missile shield. This system can be expected to be highly successful against the relatively small number of unsophisticated missiles available to North Korea.
However, even if the THAAD system is 100 percent effective, it will make very little difference. Since Seoul is only 35 miles from the DMZ, over 20 million people are in artillery range of the vast batteries North Korea keeps aimed at the South. Almost nothing can be done to stop the first rounds of incoming shells.
While politicians in America treat the thought of North Korea being able to direct even a single missile our way as a dire threat, the truth is that any action on the Korean peninsula is likely to lead to ghastly levels of causalities, none of them in the United States. Kim Jong-un, like his predecessors in North Korean leadership, is wedded to a position in which military potency is directly tied to his personal position.
Everyone would like North Korea to stop expanding its missile capacity. Everyone would be ecstatic if Kim would turn away from building nuclear weapons. The biggest beneficiaries of such an action would be the people of North Korea, who have suffered under decades of severe sanctions expressly because their own leadership stubbornly refuses to admit that it’s following a path that both causes massive damage to the nation and raises the specter of absolute destruction.
The only thing that would be worse—worse for North Korea, worse for the United States, worse for the world, and especially worse for South Korea—is a American leadership that matches North Korea in a stubborn desire to show they’re tougher than the next guy.
“If they elevate the threat of their weapons program to a level that we believe requires action, that option is on the table.” Tillerson has said his maiden Asia tour.
Meanwhile, as Rex Tillerson alternates between belligerence and sleepy, Donald Trump is ‘helping’ from half a world away.
Donald Trump has never hesitated to raise the stakes when he’s felt that the news cycle was making him look bad. Let’s just hope his next “distraction” doesn’t come with an eight-figure body count.