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.
The escalation of tensions between the United States, Britain and France, on the one hand, and Russia, on the other, should not surprise anyone. In the last few years, the US leadership and mainstream British media have presented Russia as a major threat to global peace and the international order. Russian president Vladimir Putin in particular has been demonised as a ‘war-monger,’ an ‘aggressor,’ an ‘unscrupulous politician’ hell-bent on restoring Russia’s past glory’ at whatever cost.This projection of Russia as a threat to world peace has intensified in recent days partly because of Putin’s unveiling of Russia’s cutting edge military ...
Never has US intentions in Asia been so obvious. Attempts to portray America’s role in the region as constructive or necessary have been ongoing since the end of World War II, however, recently, with Asia able to begin determining its own destiny for itself, the tone from Washington has become increasingly curt and direct.US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter’s remarks during the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore were all but a proclamation of US hegemony over Asia – a region of the planet quite literally an ocean away from Washington.In Reuters’ article, “U.S. flexes muscles as Asia worries about South China ...
There is very bad news for the US’ policymakers: Russia is back!After the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia, both weakened and isolated, was becoming a less popular area of studying and dealing with in comparison before the end of the Cold War. Global imperialists in Washington strongly believed that after 1991 Russia was simply “finished” or, better to say, they “finished” the game with Russia as Moscow was not anymore the capital of a Great Power state which had an important influence in global politics and international relations. In other words, the American warmongers in Washington thought ...
The U.N. Organization was established in 1945 for the very security reason – to preserve the peace in the world. We believe that the governmental bodies and administrative structures of the U.N. have to be composed by the proved democratically oriented politicians and magistrates but above all this requirement has to be applied to the post and function of the U.N. Secretary-General. Nevertheless, in the history of the U.N. there is at least one (extremely) problematic appointment to the post of the U.N. Secretary-General: Kurt Waldheim from Austria.On the official website of the U.N. about its fourth Secretary-General one can ...
The forthcoming USA-Russian joint action against ISIS together with Iraqi-Syrian and Turkish military advance will soon neutralize ISIS possibilities to claim a stake of a statehood in the Levant region. Nonetheless, the number of radicalized persons in Europe is increasing as also the number of Jihadist fighters returning back into the EU-thus at first glance we should see a rise in the terrorism phenomenon in the coming years.
Furthermore the existence of multiple fronts where Jihadists are trained and fight nowadays such as :Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Sahel region, Nigeria, Sudan , Yemen, Sinai; brings us to the conclusion that we ...
It seems that the recent developments in Europe, and in particular the rising secessionism (Catalonia, Flandreau, Corsica, Veneto, Scotland), rings a bell, or rather is reminiscent of certain events. The ensuing ones are shedding more light on the roles of the EU (EEC), the USA, Great Britain and Germany. One wonders to what extent those democracies have been guided by the principles of international law and democracy pertaining to the Kosovo crisis.How much did they appreciate the reports of their (expensive) missions in Kosovo and Metohija (КDОМ, КVМ, ЕCMM) depicting the realities on the ground?To what extent have they been ...
Such important reality as is shown in this picture is virtually unpublishable in mainstream US ‘news’media, because US ‘news’media need to deceive their public about the most important international realities — such as that the US imposed upon Ukraine a nazi regime against Russia, and the US now lies to accuse Russia for doing what Russia must do in order to protect itself from the US nazi regime next-door.
This picture is among many which were originally published in the excellent 4 July 2018 article by Asa Winstanley at The Electronic Intifada. His article was headlined "Israel is arming neo-Nazis in Ukraine”. That article focuses upon Israel’s strong support for ...
This article by Professor James Tracy first published in August 2015 is of particular relevance in relation to the “fake news” campaign directed against the alternative and independent media.In a bitter irony, the media coverup of the CIA’s covert support to Al Qaeda and the ISIS is instrumented by the CIA which also oversees the mainstream media.Since the end of World War Two the Central Intelligence Agency has been a major force in US and foreign news media, exerting considerable influence over what the public sees, hears and reads on a regular basis. CIA publicists and journalists alike will assert they have few, ...
Hardly any knowledgeable person doubts that Zionist ideology is the purest form of racism. Zionism is Jewish disguised racism as a raison d’etat. Israel comes right after the U. S., as far as racism is concerned. That is why the U. S. donates to this racist regime $ 3.8 bn per year in order to keep this occupation regime going. Should anybody doubt the racism of the Israeli leadership, read the following article.[1]Racism among the Israeli leadership is legendary. It started out with the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, saying: “Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it ...
NATO has expanded dramatically after the collapse of its primary rivals, the USSR and the Warsaw Treaty Organization, Canadian Professor Michael Jabara Carley notes, posing the question whether NATO was founded as a defensive or an offensive alliance.The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a military alliance aimed against the Soviet Union, was established on April 4, 1949; and only seven years after the formation of NATO the Warsaw Treaty Organization was established bringing together eight nations (versus 15 NATO member-states).So, who was the real “aggressor”? What alliance was an offensive one?“There has been much discussion recently of NATO in the mainstream and alternate media. Why was ...
For the approximately 200 Canadian military trainers currently deployed to Ukraine, it is likely that on the first of January they would have witnessed a torch lit procession. Throughout Kiev and numerous other towns in Western Ukraine, thousands of civilians took to the streets – not to usher in the New Year – but to celebrate the 110th anniversary of the birth of a man named Stepan Bandera.This was not the first time Ukrainian nationalists marched with torches to celebrate Bandera’s birthday, but it was the first time such a spectacle was an officially sanctioned affair.On December 28, 2018, Ukrainian ...
The Balkans conflicts of the 1990s saw a massive revival and resurgence of US and Western media propaganda and infowar techniques. The “new” advocacy journalists recalled the “yellow journalism” of William Randolph Hearst, who helped induce the US to engage in the imperialistic or colonial war in Cuba in 1898, the Spanish-American War. This marked the emergence of the US as an expansionist global imperial and colonial power, like Britain, France, Spain, and Germany had been. Hearst was credited with manufacturing or “furnishing” the war in Cuba.
Frederic Remington, his correspondent in Cuba, reported that nothing was happening in Cuba, that ...
Brzezinski’s death at 89 years of age has generated a load of propaganda and disinformation, all of which serves one interest group or another or the myths that people find satisfying. I am not an expert on Brzezinski, and this is not an apology for him. He was a Cold Warrior, as essentially was everyone in Washington during the Soviet era.For 12 years Brzezinski was my colleague at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where I occupied the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy. When I was elected to that chair, CSIS was a part of Georgetown University. ...
Despite claims made during NATO Summit Warsaw 2016, that “NATO remains a fundamental source of security for our people, and stability for the wider world,” it is clear that the threats and challenges NATO poses as existing to confront are in fact threats of its own, intentional creation and continued perpetuation.
From the ongoing refugee crisis triggered by NATO’s own global-spanning and ongoing military interventions, invasions, and occupations, to its continued expansion along Russia’s borders – violating every convention and “norm” that existed during the Cold War to keep it “cold,” NATO has proven that it is to the populations it poses as protector over, ...
On January 19th, 2016 on the bilateral meeting between Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and the official representatives of the European Jewish Congress the latter applied to Putin to take necessary steps for the sake to improve the generally bad position of the Jewish community on the Old Continent. Surprisingly, the President, not so much as a joke, invited both all the present-day European Jews and those Jews who left the USSR simply to immigrate to Russia.At the first glance, one can say – very gentle and even democratic move by the President. However, lets a little bit to analyze the ...
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1244 (1999) guaranteeing sovereignty and territorial integrity of Serbia and the autonomy of Kosovo and Metohija within Serbia, is the highest binding legal document that obliges all UN members, including the member states of the EU, NATO, the OSCE, the OIC, the African Union.Resolution 1244 is the only reliable basis and the framework for any negotiations concerning status. Owing to grave mistakes made by the former Serbian authorities, the UN system has produced certain damaging documents of advisory and non-binding character. It is vital that no similar or even greater mistakes are made either presently ...
In late November 2013, the 'Euromaidan' in Kiev began as a popular protest against a generalized state of corruption and cronyism in Ukraine. The spark that ostensibly ignited the protests was the inability of then President Yanukovych to sign an EU Association Agreement that would cut Ukraine's economic and military ties to Russia in favor of a closer relationship with the EU and NATO.The EU had made the release of former Ukrainian prime minister and "gas princess" Tymoshenko a precondition for signing the agreement. But the fact that Tymoshenko was/is a convicted embezzler of state funds, combined with the rather ...
The US media has done it again. In a breaking news story on Fox News on Friday, September 28, 2007, Fox reporter Catherine Herridge used the term “former Yugoslavia” twice in the Fox story “Terrorist 007”. The term Yugoslavia was used deliberately to conceal the fact that the Al Qaeda terrorist known as Terrorist 007, or Irhabi 007 in Arabic, Younes Tsouli, had ties to Bosnia and to Bosnian Muslims who planned terrorist attacks.Fox News sought to conceal this Al Qaeda connection to Bosnia by using the term “former Yugoslavia” in place of “Bosnia”. This was deliberate and planned. Someone ...
As the Cold War entered its final act in 1985, journalist Helena Cobban participated in an academic conference at an upscale resort near Tucson, Arizona, on U.S.-Soviet interactions in the Middle East. When she attended what was listed as the “Gala Dinner with keynote speech”, she quickly learned that the virtual theme of the evening was, “Adopt a Muj.”
“I remember mingling with all of these wealthy Republican women from the Phoenix suburbs and being asked, ‘Have you adopted a muj?” Cobban told me. “Each one had pledged money to sponsor a member of the Afghan mujahedin in the name ...
This is a long story which extends over fifteen years. NATO first attempted to silence those citizens who were trying to discover the truth about the attacks of 11 September 2001. Then it turned on those who contested the oficial version of the «Arab Springs» and the war against Syria. One thing leading to another, it then attacked those who denounced the coup d’état in Ukraine. Now NATO is behind the accusations by a pseudo-NGO that the people who campaigned for Donald Trump are Russian agents.
The attacks of 11 September 2001 were followed by a permanent state of emergency and ...
The War on Yugoslavia, Kosovo “Self-Determination” and EU-NATO Support of KLA Terrorists: Dietmar Hartwig’s Warning Letters to Angela Merkel
This is the Real, Americanized, Nazi-Dominated Ukraine
The CIA and the Media: 50 Facts the World Needs to Know
Zionism is Racism
Why didn’t Washington Dissolve NATO after Collapse of USSR?
Ukraine Re-Writes History by Celebrating Nazi Collaborator
Hidden Manipulators: Who is Behind the “Kosova Independence” Campaign?
Zbigniew Brzezinski – War Criminal Supreme
NATO: Lying All the Way to Barbarossa
Why Putin Discriminates Kosovo Serbs?
The Status of Kosovo and Metohija: Brussels Unites the Albanians and Divides the Serbs
Euromaidan: Anatomy of a Washington-Backed Coup D’etat
“Yugoslavia” Again: Terrorist 007
The Other Side of John McCain
The NATO Campaign Against Freedom of Expression
FOLLOW US ON OUR SOCIAL PLATFORMS
Publish your articles on global politics, history, and international relations online & advertise your website for a moderate charging fee at www.global-politics.eu (contact: globalpol@global-politics.eu). For more details see the Submission section on our website. We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We mainly rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations. Follow us on our social platforms!
