By Stephen Miles and Murshed Zaheed
Stephen Miles is the Director of Win Without War and Murshed Zaheed is Vice President and Political Director at CREDO Mobile, America’s only progressive phone company. He was formerly a leadership aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
When Donald Trump cancelled back-channel negotiations with the North Koreans just one month after taking office, we knew it wasn’t a good sign that the new administration was already abandoning diplomacy as a means to rein in its nuclear program, and that the possibility of war on the Korean peninsula would increase significantly.
Since then, the North Koreans have launched a series of provocative missile tests and threatened to test another nuclear weapon. And in response, Donald Trump has ratcheted up the bellicose rhetoric -- warning of “a major, major conflict with North Korea” -- and sent more American military assets to the region, complete with public displays of force such as U.S. bombers flying overhead.
Throw the recent tragic death of Otto Warmbier into the mix -- the American student who died as a result of conditions endured at the hands of his North Korean captors -- and we have a situation that could quickly and easily spiral out of control toward a destructive war, or worse, a nuclear catastrophe.
But despite this bleak picture, there’s reason for optimism.
South Koreans recently elected a new president, Moon Jae-in, who campaigned on a pledge to engage in negotiations with North Korea to freeze and reverse its nuclear weapons program, and to pursue a diplomatic path to finally put an end to the decades-old conflict between the North and South.
Given the difficult environment that President Moon’s diplomatic undertaking must operate in -- i.e. dealing with erratic and unstable American leadership spouting war rhetoric, and a despotic North Korean dictator offering much of the same -- we, along with nearly a dozen organizations representing millions of Americans, thought it important to send Moon a strong signal that we support his efforts while he’s in Washington, DC this week in meetings with Trump.
That’s why we recently launched a petition with Daily Kos and other allied organizations -- which has garnered nearly 150,000 signatures -- expressing our heartfelt and unwavering support for President Moon’s policy because we know that diplomacy, not war, is the only way to address the dangers of North Korea’s nuclear program.
But it’s not just our members who feel this way. One recent survey found that a large majority of Americans -- 69 percent -- said that the U.S. should mostly use diplomacy in its dealings with North Korea, while just 23 percent said military action is necessary.
Another poll found that most Americans are concerned about Trump’s ability to handle the North Korean nuclear situation and believe the North Korean threat can be contained.
In short, the American people don’t want war, are wary of Trump’s militaristic rhetoric, and agree with President Moon that constructive, multilateral diplomatic negotiations is the most effective path forward.
America’s top diplomat, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, recently said that “the United States has spoken enough about North Korea.” We couldn’t disagree more. With the Trump regime inching the U.S. military closer to more war in the Middle East -- and possibly a direct confrontation with Iran -- it’s important now more than ever that the U.S. government explore any and every diplomatic option to prevent a nuclear catastrophe on the Korean peninsula.
The choice between military action and diplomacy is clear. We’ll do what we can to support President Moon’s efforts, we can only hope that the Trump administration follows suit.