Why My North Korea Resolve Could Have Made President Trump 'Famous' at the UN!

Had the advisors to President Trump read my blog essay on "How to Resolve the North Korea Crisis" of August 10, 2017 (https://www.edwinseditorial.com/2017/08/how-to-resolve-north-korea-crisis.html), could they have made him 'famous' at the United Nations? If Mr. Trump had presented my two-tier approach to resolving this crisis, which is not only politically sound but also morally legitimate, they would hail him as a statesman by now. Does this sound conceited or arrogant? It might seem at the beginning of this brief essay, but hopefully will no longer at the end.

 

Imagine Mr. Trump, heeding the advice I proposed in my blog essay, saying something like the following in his speech at the United Nations Assembly: "I assure the world public that the U.S. will never use nuclear force against North Korea first. I guarantee the North Korean regime that the U.S. and its allies will not forcefully implement regime change in North Korea. My political administration will pursue the establishment of a peace treaty to that effect. While this process is ongoing and until we achieve a satisfying result, the U.S. will observe the principle of 'deterrence by denial.' It will implement missile defense capabilities and civil defense measures to protect itself and its allies if North Korea decides to abandon this proposal for resolving the crisis between our nations peacefully. However, I assure the world community of nations that if North Korea should strike or attempt to hit the U.S. or its allies with weapons of mass destruction first, the United States will strike back with all its might at whatever cost this might entail for the North Korean people."

 

This statement would have not only been prudent to say in the sense of putting the U.S. on the moral high ground in this conflict. It would also acknowledge that the experts in Washington D. C. had finally understood what North Korea's aggressive posture and its constant missile and nuclear testing is all about: to generate some atomic capacity to deter the United States from regime-change intervention! As mentioned previously, only the nuclear capability can be the big "equalizer" and dissuade potential imperialist intentions even on a conventional military level.

 

Did the world not watch or forget about what happened not long ago, i.e., in Libya, in 2011, at the Obama/Clinton cabinet's hands, when U.S. and NATO forces launched an air campaign to support dubious insurgent groups against the Libyan military and government forces? Such was the reward Libya's leader Muammar Gadhafi, murdered in the streets, received for his retreat from pursuing nuclear weapons and his trust and handshake with Obama and incumbent European heads of state at the time. And have we not observed what the U.S. did to Syria in the misguided and failed regime-change attempt to oust President Assad, arming terrorists and insurgents, supporting al-Qaeda and ISIS and other groups in the region, causing unspeakable and unnecessary mayhem? Now the Russians had to restore stability and prop Assad, and at this point, it is not hard to predict that the Syrian intervention attempt will end up as a massive embarrassment for the United States. Aside from that: What about all the waste of human life and treasure on both sides? Were some military-industrial profit and the satisfaction of Mr. Obama's ideological arrogance indeed worth the chaos, the cost of lives, and the unleashing of refugees and displaced people onto the shores of Europe?

 

As unfortunate as the most likely acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by North Korea is, it comes for good reasons and a clear rationale that the North Korean regime hides behind its seemingly erratic behavior. The U.S.' policy failures nourished this rationale.

 

The U.S. and the international community should further pursue containment and denuclearization of the Korean peninsula; however, they should not make it a condition for peace. The probable possession of specific nuclear capabilities of North Korea does not and must not justify a preemptive strike.

 

Instead of further pursuing hypocritical foreign affairs policies that cause more trouble than resolving issues, it is high time to arrive at some collective realization of past follies in foreign affairs among Washington's elites and to change course.

 

This nation and its leader need to eliminate the war-mongering neoliberal and neoconservative nomenclature in the U.S. State Department and among the advisory bodies to the White House. Leaders of nations cannot know everything, but we expect them to have an excellent and pragmatic judgment that enables them to choose wisely among policy proposals. Without wise choice offered, they will most likely fail.

US and European Foreign Policy – the Blunder of Liberal Interventionism continues with Libya

Peoples have a moral right to political self-determination; (nation-) States have a juridical right to sovereignty and territorial integrity. 

 

The political mistake of consistently violating this main idea continues now, after the surge of international military interventions into sovereign nations' internal affairs in the 1990s, with Libya. Apart from the unwise decision to commit to intervening in Libya, the decision to intervene by establishing a no-fly zone came too late; the objective is unclear; the conduct of the operation is flawed. The Western coalition is neglecting a fundamental principle of the philosophy of just war – war should be waged only be waged if there is proportionality between objectives and cost. In other words, the damage and suffering the war causes should not be more significant than the hurt and suffering it aims to avert.

 

To prevent interventions by the international community into sovereign nations' domestic affairs, the United Nations Charter introduced and acknowledged the sovereign equality of all nations. The United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2131 of December 21, 1965, reemphasizes this principle once again: "No state has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatsoever, in the internal or external affairs of another State. Consequently, armed intervention and all other forms of interference or attempted threats against the personality of the State or against its political, economic, or cultural elements are condemned." 

 

This stipulation is a morally valid norm in a global society. As is currently the case in Libya, a government quelling violent political uprisings or revolutionary attempts that aim at its overthrow does not constitute a justifiable cause for intervention. A State can only lose the fundamental State right of sovereignty if a government commits crimes against humanity in the sense of religious or ethnic cleansing or pogroms on certain parts of its population. Cracking down on insurgents and revolutionaries does not fall under this category. 

 

Since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, Western powers have begun to violate this principle profoundly. National uprisings received support by outright forceful intervention in some countries, but not in others. Apart from military feasibility considerations, ideological bias was the primary incentive for interventions.

Western powers began to breach the principle of national sovereignty during Yugoslavia's disintegration in the early 1990s. After they prematurely acknowledged the former Yugoslav provinces as independent nation-states, the subsequently fledgling states that had just seceded from the former Yugoslav Republic needed help. Thus was the NATO 1995 bombing in Bosnia and Herzegovina vindicated in the wake of the Srebrenica Massacre's apparent horrors. In the two years prior, despite an imposed no-flight zone by NATO, the war had raged on unrestrictedly on the ground before American and NATO airstrikes of Operation Deliberate Force finally paved the way for the 1995 Dayton Peace Accord. 

A few years later, Liberal Interventionism continued, as always for allegedly humanitarian reasons, in Kosovo. After Serbian police and military forces cracked down on Albanian freedom fighters (the Kosovo Liberation Army/KLA), the Euro-Atlantic alliance suddenly felt compelled to embark upon an air-campaign to prevent a humanitarian disaster and take out Serbian forces. Nobody mentioned that the KLA had advanced their case in Kosovo with violent means. Their acts of cruelties underlined the KLA's unjustifiable use of violent means. The reversal of cause and effect, in both ethical as well as political terms, was palpable. There is a good reason and evidence to believe that intervention caused increased bloodshed and intensified ethnic cleansing in both instances, at least in the short term, thus aggravating the humanitarian crisis it intended to prevent in the first place.

 

The same appears to be happening in Libya now. Encouraged by events in Egypt, a dubious group of insurgents, yet to be defined in their ethnic, religious, and political composition, seek to oust Muammar Qaddafi's regime. The callous Qaddafi did not kill his people before the uprising broke out. And he did not attack another country or neglect UN-resolutions over years and years. He crushed an uprising which every political leader – authoritarian or otherwise – would have done. There are no national interests at stake for the US and the EU. There is no humanitarian necessity for intervention, and there is no need to establish a no-fly zone. 

 

The reason for this ignorance in security matters owes to an unbearable unawareness about political theory, international affairs, and the nature of the armed conflict. Neither liberal left nor libertarian right, on both sides of the Atlantic, has ever understood the business of war. When dealing with political violence and armed struggle, they either do too much or too little. In the case of the current political administration in the US, this ignorance manifests itself in a lack of a consistent foreign policy strategy, exacerbated by an astonishing lack of leadership capability on the part of the president. 

 

If it consoles Mr. Obama or anybody, I shall mention that he is not alone. Some heads of government in the European Union contend for the number one ranking in committing foreign policy blunder.