If Pentagon chief James Mattis was seeking to reassure the world of American restraint in the North Korea crisis, he clumsily did the opposite. The US Defense Secretary was speaking after intense discussions with President Trump and other senior military officials in the White House Situation Room following the sixth nuclear test carried out by North Korea on Sunday.
Mattis emerged from the meeting to say that any threat from North Korea to the United States and its allies would be met with an «overwhelming military response». He then added – with a weirdly presumed ethical tone – that the US «was not looking to the total annihilation of North Korea».
That was supposed to mean that the US military would exercise restraint – by not obliterating a country with a population of 25 million. Well, we should be so grateful. That’s so goddamn generous of the Americans!
How reassuring that the United States with a nuclear arsenal of 5,000 warheads should express an apparent reluctance to annihilate. So, US rulers are bragging about hitting North Korea with overwhelming military power, but at the same time Washington expects to be given moral credit for stating that it is not looking to annihilate a whole country.
The implicit logic here articulated by Mattis shows how depraved American leadership is.
In any case, the words of «reassurance» from the Pentagon chief do little to assuage fears that the US will indeed recklessly incite a war with North Korea involving weapons of mass destruction.
Trump, Mattis and other senior White House officials have repeatedly threatened over the past two months to carry out a pre-emptive military strike on North Korea, including the deployment of nuclear weapons.
Recall last month the casual way that Trump – while having lunch at his private golf resort – warned he would unleash «fire and fury on North Korea like the world has never seen before». And those words were uttered on the 72nd anniversary of the American atomic holocaust of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
On Sunday, following news reports that North Korea had conducted a sixth underground nuclear test, Trump reportedly «reaffirmed the commitment of the United States to defending our homeland, territories, and allies using the full range of diplomatic, conventional and nuclear capabilities at our disposal». In other words, again, the nuclear option is very much on the American table, as if it’s as mundane a thing as a bottle of ketchup.
Trump also remarked: «North Korea’s words and actions continue to be very hostile and dangerous to the United States».
What is acutely worrying is that the US leaders have now set a highly dangerous subjective threshold of «perceived threat» from North Korea as a criterion for unleashing military force. And as we have heard repeatedly, that US force will undoubtedly include the use of nuclear weapons.
Trump and his generals seem to have lost all reasonable cognitive connection with the world.
We see ample evidence of this disconnect with regard to the rapid breakdown in bilateral relations with Russia. The American authorities keep pushing the envelope of provocation toward Russia with sanctions and the unprecedented seizure of diplomatic properties – all on the spurious grounds of alleged Russian election meddling or alleged Russian threats to NATO allies.
That is just one sign of how divorced from reality the US leadership has become. They seem to have become a victim of their own sensationalist, unhinged propaganda.
With regard to North Korea, similar to Russia, the Americans are infused with a mentality of demonization. They seem to read everyone else and every situation in debased terms of racial prejudice, existential threat, and paranoia. Thus, Vladimir Putin is the alleged «new Hitler» with designs of conquering Europe; North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is viewed as a «nutcase» who wants to «nuke us».
The Trump administration has also the added volatility of incoherent policy. Last week when North Korea test-fired a ballistic missile over Japanese territory, Trump blurted menacingly that «talking was not the answer». That could have been taken as meaning imminent military action. Then Trump’s Defense Secretary James Mattis moved to calm the rhetoric by saying that «there was still room for diplomacy».
Trump has declared that he will not give notice of any military action. That puts the situation on a hair-trigger. What is North Korea to think when the US and its South Korean ally are carrying out massive war drills off the Korean Peninsula premised on a decapitation strike against Kim Jong-un?
It’s not just North Korea that is second-guessing Washington. Trump’s latest rebuke to South Korea for «appeasing» North Korea has unnerved the government of President Moon Jae-in, fearing that the US might be willing to sacrifice its supposed ally by starting a pre-emptive war. Moon has previously said that he received assurance from the Trump administration that it will not take military action without consulting Seoul. The Trump administration has not publicly confirmed that. South Korea is fearful that the Americans would sacrifice large numbers of its people in a reckless act of trying to destroy North Korea.
Washington’s psychopathic mentality is encapsulated in the Pentagon chief saying that his country «was not looking to annihilate North Korea». To even utter such barbarity as being a possibility shows how degenerate official American thinking is. Such psychopathic thinking, however, is fully consistent with how American military force has laid waste to countless countries and their civilian populations down through the decades, from Hiroshima to Raqqa in present day Syria. After all, Marine General James Mattis earned his nickname «Mad Dog» from overseeing the destruction of the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2004, with the use of white phosphorus incendiary bombs.
The height of American criminal insanity is its insistence that the Korean crisis must be dealt with by either economic warfare through strangulating sanctions on North Korea and freezing and starving its people – or by overwhelming military force.
Grotesquely, the Americans talk about the world standing together against North Korea. More to the point, the world must stand together and insist that Washington takes the only morally viable option of conducting diplomacy for a peaceful resolution.
As Russia and China have both urged, the US has to talk with North Korea without preconditions. Given the decades of American militarism on the Korean Peninsula and threats of nuclear annihilation, North Korea has legitimate concerns about its security. North Korea needs and deserves security guarantees and economic cooperation, not deepening isolation. Its weapons program is its only leverage. To portray North Korea as being an irrational threat to world peace is to succumb to American demonizing propaganda.
The world must explore the diplomatic, legal, civilized option. It must totally reject the American diktat for conflict.
There is a viable peaceful way to resolve the Korean crisis. But it requires all sides to abide by diplomacy and international law. America’s self-proclaimed prerogative of waging war and destruction on other nations is central to the problem, and must be repudiated by the international community.
But the profoundly disturbing thing is that there appears to be no-one in the American leadership that can even vaguely conceive of the obligation for committing to peace, diplomacy and civility.
The world is being railroaded by a violent tyranny – and it’s not in Pyongyang, it’s in Washington.
Originally published on 2017-09-06
About the author: Finian Cunnigham is a former editor and writer for major news media organizations. He has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages.
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
Most veteran observers, including Israeli security authorities and Palestinian leadership, were dumbfounded by recent events in Jerusalem, where tens of thousands of Palestinians mobilized non-violently in response to the Israeli closure of the Old City and placement of metal detectors at the entrance of the Dome of Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque. What was the secret ingredient that made such a mass action take place and be a successful example in Palestinian non-violent resistance to the 50 years of Israeli military occupation? How did it happen so spontaneously, non-violently and with seemingly no leadership?A new report by the group, titled, Relations Between Palestinians Across ...
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]Save
“I’ll never live to see 9/11 justice,” says Stephen Lendman. The 9/11 attacks have changed the course of humanity, even so for sixteen years have not been minimally clarified but turned the world in a place full of fear and hate as the United States spreads its military bases all over the world, having 737 and more than 2,500,000 U.S. personnel serving across the planet.Stephen Lendman, one of the world’s most respected analysts, speaks with Pravda Report on the consequences of those attacks, and President Trump’s denial of his promises during the presidential campaign to investigate the day that has killed more than one million people ...
US President Theodore Roosevelt, a staunch imperialist and expansionist, engineered the illegal dismemberment of Colombia in 1903.The illegal US dismemberment and annexation of Serbian territory, the detachment, and dismemberment of Kosovo in 2008, parallels what occurred when the US illegally dismembered Columbia in 1903 in order to construct the Panama Canal.Outrage, shock, and uproar followed Roosevelt’s illegal detachment of Panama from Columbia in 1903. Many American leaders were outraged at the illegality, cynicism, and immorality of the dismemberment of Columbia.In the March 2, 1912 New York Times article “Hit at Roosevelt in Panama Inquiry; Senate Calls on Taft for All Records ...
Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working.We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.There are three ways to financially support us:1. By sending financial support directly to our bank account. If you chose the first option, our Bank account details are as follows:Recipient’s details:SWIFT/BIC Code: CBVILT2XIBAN: LT737044000103617388Account name:Vladislav Sotirovič2. By sending financial support using the Western Union money transfer system. In this case, our necessary details as the Receiver are:First Name: ...
On 4th of April 2019 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) “celebrated” the 70th Anniversary of its murderous existence. This horror organization was born sort of as a “Rosemary’s Baby”, signed into life in Washington DC, as the North Atlantic Treaty. Its creation was absolutely unethical but also absolutely “legal” – meaning what we, the west, have made the law, a man-made law for war, was applied by the Washington-Pentagon driven NATO. Estimates have it, that NATO and its ‘allies’, cronies, proxies and mercenaries killed more than 20 million people since NATO’s existence, basically since the end of WWII. Compare this with ...
1. Out of the 14.2 million Jewish people in the world, (in 2016), only a minority of 43% reside in Israel.
2. Whilst 75% of Israelis are Jewish, 21% are indigenous Arabs with restricted civil rights.
3. Israel has the highest birth rate in the developed world, with an average of 3 children per woman.
4. The Netanyahu government now receives more than US$6 billion every year from the US congress/ AIPAC lobby i.e. equating to $1000 annually for every Jewish Israeli, courtesy of the American taxpayer.
5. Israel has induced over 500,000 of its citizens to illegally settle in the Occupied Palestinian West ...
IntroductionThe article deals with the Great Economic Depression of 1929-1933 and its negative consequences on the economy of the German Weimar Republic. The aim of the article is to present the main causes and consequences of the global economic and financial crises known as the Great Economic Depression and to investigate how this depression influences the economy and finance of the newly democratic post-war German state called the Weimar Republic. The particular importance of this research subject is the fact that among all European states at the time it was exactly the Weimar Republic to be mostly affected by the ...
The world has suddenly realised that there is a “refugee crisis”. There are more refugees now than at any time since World War II. The number has grown three-fold since the end of 2001. The problem is treated as if it arose just recently, but it has been a long time coming. The pressure has been building and building until it has burst the dams of wilful ignorance.
Death and despair has migrated to the doorsteps of Europe. But tens of millions of people do not simply abandon home and native land for an insecure dangerous future of desperate struggle. The ...
The US has been threatening Iran for more than 20 years. Already during the Clinton administration, US Central Command (USCENTCOM) had formulated “in war theater plans” to invade both Iraq and Iran. This posting which includes selected articles from our archives was originally published by Global Research 12 years ago in May 2005. In the wake of the war on Iraq (2003), the Bush administration officially identified Iran and Syria as the next stage of “the road map to war”. Bush’s National Security doctrine contained in the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was a continuation of Clinton’s “strategy of ...
There are horrific realities of history that must not be questioned, distorted or denied by anyone with even the slightest integrity or sense of decency.
The slaughter of millions of Jews in the death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Majdanek, Belzec, Chelmno and Sobibor during the Holocaust of World War II falls squarely in this category.
So does the fundamental fact that this ultimate crime against humanity was perpetrated by Nazi Germany and its multinational fascist accomplices.
Any attempt to deny or to attempt to trivialise or minimise the enormity of this genocide, or to rehabilitate its perpetrators in any way whatsoever, is, simply ...
The Military-Industrial Complex runs U.S. foreign policies. What passes for international 'news' reporting in the United States media was supremely represented by the instance of those 'news' media stenographically reporting the Government's lies about 'Saddam's WMD', even after it was unarguably clear that those were just blatant lies from the President and his Administration. America's media were merely passive megaphones for the regime's lies. Instead of disproving the regime's lies — as they could have done if they were journalistic, instead of propagandistic, media — they merely reported the lying government's assertions. It was like 1984 "Big Brother"; and it ...
According to a number of global mainstream media sources, the Pentagon is covering up a disturbing video that was never made public with the rest of the recent torture report.According to various well respected journalists, including Seymour Hersh, the appalling video was recorded at Abu Ghraib, the notorious US torture dungeon in Iraq that made headlines roughly a decade ago, when the inhumane tactics being used at the prison were exposed.Sadly, it seems that the evidence released years ago was only scratching the surface.While the video has remained under wraps thus far, Hersh says it is only a matter of time before it ...
A historical overview and Estonia's minorities
Estonia (Eesti, Estland) is a Baltic state that was colonized by the German Teutonic Order of Knights from 1346 being, therefore, dominated politically and economically by a German-speaking landowning aristocracy, which succeeded to maintain its social and economic position even during the Swidish occupation of the territory of present-day Estonia from 1561 to 1721 and for most period of subsequent Russia's administration since 1721 to 1915. From 1855 the ethnic Estonians received the right to possess the land. Migration increased the Estonian population in the cities during the time of the Russian administration. It is ...
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]SaveSave
Sultan Abdul Hamid II, in the face of a rising secular nationalism in the late 1800s, that culminated in the Young Turk movement, tried to restore the influence of the Ottoman Empire among Islamic nations and the Empire’s many peoples by stressing the importance of Islam and the Ottoman Caliphate, of the role of the Ottomans as the protectors of Islam and, in the modern world, a bulwark against western colonialism.Over a hundred years after he left power, after the Empire was broken up by the western powers after the First World War, after the Turkish nationalists under Mustafa Kemal, ...
It is calculated that in addition to the secret arsenal of up to 400 nuclear warheads, according to American Scientists, the Israeli state also reportedly possesses chemical and/or biological WMD, making it a dangerous nuclear hegemon that poses a potential threat not only to the Middle East but also to Europe. Neither France nor Britain nor Germany can equal Israeli state nuclear weaponisation on both land and sea.This calculation is based on the fact that the state of Israel is the only WMD state to refuse to be a party to either the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) or the Biological ...
For the first time since WW II, overt fascists hold real power in Europe. Radicalized ultranationalists. Anti-Semites. Hate-mongers.
Cold-blooded killers. Whitewashing high crimes. A puppet regime. America’s newest colony.
Mocking democratic values. Violating fundamental rule of law principles. Unaccountably.
Western leaders won’t explain. Nor will the media. Hard truths are buried.
Ukraine’s government usurped power forcibly. Putschist rule has no legitimacy.
Especially regimes waging war on their own people. Murdering them in cold blood. Committing horrendous human rights abuses.
Tolerating no opposition. Ruling by intimidation. Force-feeding neoliberal harshness on impoverished people. Making life unbearable overall. More on this below.
On December 4, Wall Street Journal editors published ...
On December 7, 1941. Japan’s Attack on Pearl HarborMyth: The US was forced to declare war on Japan after a totally unexpected Japanese attack on the American naval base in Hawaii on December 7, 1941. On account of Japan’s alliance with Nazi Germany, this aggression automatically brought the US into the war against Germany. Reality: The Roosevelt administration had been eager for some time to wage war against Japan and sought to unleash such a war by means of the institution of an oil embargo and other provocations. Having deciphered Japanese codes, Washington knew a Japanese fleet was on its ...
The U.S. Government certainly leads the world in invasions and coups.In recent years, it has invaded and occupied — either by military assault or by coup, but in either case followed by installing (or trying to install) a new regime there — a number of countries, especially Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen. U.S. propaganda says that its invasions and military occupations (and it denies its coups) are to benefit the people in the invaded and militarily occupied countries, or to bring them ‘democracy’, and are not done merely to benefit the people who control the U.S. Government (which itself is not a ...
SHORT LEGAL DISCLAIMER: The website’s owner & editor-in-chief has no official position on any issue published at this website. The views of the authors presented at this website do not necessarily coincide with the opinion of the owner & editor-in-chief of the website. The contents of all material (articles, books, photos, videos…) are of sole responsibility of the authors. The owner & editor-in-chief of this website is not morally, scientifically or legally responsible for any inaccurate or incorrect statement in the contents of all material found on this website. The owner & editor-in-chief of this website is not responsible for the content of external internet sites. No advertising, government or corporate funding for the functioning of this website. The owner & editor-in-chief and authors are not morally, scientifically or legally responsible for any inaccurate or incorrect statement in the text and material found on the website www.global-politics.eu
