Just as North and South Korea achieve important peaceful
exchanges, Washington and its NATO allies appear to be moving with
determination to sabotage the initiative for averting war on the East Asian
peninsula.
Further, the reckless,
gratuitous provocations beg the conclusion that the United States is indeed
trying to start a war.
Meanwhile,
unprecedented accusations this
week by US President Donald Trump that Russia is supporting North Korea to
evade United Nations sanctions also point to the danger that any conflict could
spiral out of control to engulf world nuclear powers.
Moscow rejected the
unsubstantiated claims leveled by Trump, saying that Russia is abiding by UN
trade restrictions over North Korea, and that the American president’s
allegations were “entirely unfounded”.
Trump’s verbal broadside
suggests that Washington is trying to undermine the nascent talks between the
two Koreas, talks which Russia and China have both applauded as a long-overdue
diplomatic effort to resolve the Korean conflict.
Separately,
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov deplored a
summit held in Vancouver, Canada, earlier this week in which the US and 19
other nations – most of them NATO members – called for sharper sanctions on
North Korea that go beyond the remit of the United Nations. The conference,
co-hosted by Canada’s Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland and
US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, issued a stridently bellicose statement,
calling in effect for North Korea to surrender its nuclear weapons or face
US-led military action.
Significantly, and pointedly,
China and Russia were not invited to the Canadian summit.
Most of the attending states
were part of the original US-led military force which fought against North
Korea during the 1950-53 war. A war which killed as many as two million North
Koreans.
Russia
admonished that the conference was “harmful” to current peace talks between
North and South Korea. China rebuked the
Canadian event as being stuck in “Cold War thinking”.
The anachronism of countries
like Britain, Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Netherlands and Norway attending
a conference on the Korean crisis while Asia-Pacific powers Russia and China
being excluded was noted by Russia’s Sergei Lavrov. The anachronism is not only
absurd, he said, it reprises a provocative “war summit” message.
Disturbingly, what the
Vancouver gathering demonstrated was the willingness by the US and its allies
to circumvent the United Nations Security Council and the previously
established regional Six-Party forum involving the two Koreas, China, Japan,
Russia and the US.
At the Vancouver event,
Tillerson laid out a belligerent agenda that was endorsed by the other
attendees. The agenda included the precondition of North Korea giving up its
nuclear program unilaterally; and it also flatly rejected the proposal made by
Russia and China for a “freeze” in all military activities on the Korean
Peninsula as a step to get comprehensive settlement talks going.
Tillerson made the following
sinister ultimatum: “We have to recognize that that threat [of North Korea’s
nuclear weapons] is growing. And if North Korea does not choose the path of
engagement, discussion, negotiation, [that is, surrender] then they themselves
will trigger an option [US military action].”
The
US diplomat also warned that the American public must be “sober” about the
possibility of war breaking out. Tillerson said the risk of such a war on the
Korean Peninsula “continues to grow”. This was echoed by President
Trump a day later in an interview with the Reuters news agency in which he also
warned of possible war. It was the same interview in which Trump blamed Russia
for aiding and abetting North Korea.
This sounds like US leaders
are intensifying the conditioning of the American public to accept use of the
military option, which they have been threatening for the past year in a
pre-emptive attack on North Korea.
The Vancouver summit also
called for proactive interdiction of international ships suspected of breaching
UN sanctions on North Korea. That raises the danger of the US and its allies
interfering with Russian and Chinese vessels – which would further escalate
tensions.
These reprehensible
developments are a reflection of the increasingly Orwellian worldview held by
Washington and its partners, whereby “war is presented as peace” and “peace is
perceived as war”.
Just this week, North and
South Korea held a third round of peace negotiations in as many weeks. Even
Western news media hailed “Olympic breakthrough” after the two adversaries
agreed to participate in the opening ceremony of the forthcoming winter games
next month as a unified nation under a neutral flag.
After two years of no
inter-Korean talks and mounting war tensions on the peninsula, surely the
quickening pace of peace overtures this month should be welcomed and
encouraged. Russia, China and the UN have indeed endorsed the bilateral Korean
exchange. Even President Trump said he welcomed it.
Nevertheless, as the
Vancouver summit this week shows, the US and its NATO allies appear to be doing
everything to torpedo the inter-Korean dialogue. Issuing ultimatums and warning
of “military options” seems intended to blow up the delicate dynamic towards
confidence and trust.
Two reports this week in the
New York Times conveyed the contorted Orwellian mindset gripping Washington and
its allies.
First,
there was the report: “Military
quietly prepares for a last resort: War with North Korea”. The NY Times
actually reported extensive Pentagon plans for a preemptive air assault on
North Korea involving a “deep attack” manned by 82nd Airborne paratroopers and
special forces. The paper spun the provocative war plans as a “last resort”. In
other words, war is sold here as peace.
Which raises the question of
who is trying to wreck the Olympic Games being held in South Korea in February.
For months, Western media have been warning that North Korea was intending to
carry out some kind of sabotage. Now, it looks like the sabotage is actually
coming from the US, albeit sanitized by the NY Times.
The
second report in the NY Times had
the telling headline: “Olympic détente upends US strategy on North Korea”.
So, let’s get our head around
that display of dubious logic. A peaceful development of détente between two
adversaries is somehow presented as a pernicious “upending of US strategy on
North Korea”. In other words, peace is sold here as war.
Take
for example this choice editorial comment from the NY Times in the second report: “This latest
gesture of unity, the most dramatic in a decade, could add to fears in
Washington that Pyongyang is making progress on a more far-reaching agenda.”
And what, one wonders, would
that “far-reaching agenda” entail?
Again the NY Times elaborates:
“White House officials warn that the ultimate goal of [North Korean leader] Mr
Kim is to evict American troops from the Korean Peninsula and to reunify the
two Koreas under a single flag… For the United States, the fear has been that
North Korea’s gestures will drive a wedge between it and its ally, South
Korea.”
Only in a perverse Orwellian
worldview would an initiative to calm tensions and build peaceful relations be
construed as something to “fear” and be opposed to.
Only in a perverse Orwellian
worldview would peaceful dialogue provoke plans for pre-emptive war.
But that is precisely the
kind of dystopian world that Washington and its lackeys inhabit.
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