By Dave Stockton
NORTH KOREA’S Hydrogen bomb test has underlined once again not only the capacity of Kim Jong-un’s regime to achieve its nuclear ambitions, but also the failure of all attempts to stop that with threats. As futile as US President Donald Trump’s bluster has been, however, it ramps up the danger that either side’s posturing could turn into actual conflict.
Trump has warned that future North Korean threats to the USA would “be met with fire, fury and, frankly, power, the likes of which this world has never seen before”. He later tweeted: “My first order as president was to renovate and modernise our nuclear arsenal. It is now far stronger and more powerful than ever before. Hopefully we will never have to use this power, but there will never be a time that we are not the most powerful nation in the world!”.
That last sentence is aimed not just at Pyongyang but also at Beijing, Moscow and even Berlin. Speaking for the whole US ruling class, Trump in effect is saying even if they eventually catch up with the USA economically, no rival bloc of states will ever be allowed to challenge the USA’s absolute global military hegemony. Behind this lies a recognition that, if that ever did happen, then the USA could expect to be despoiled and humiliated, just as it did to its own imperialist rivals after 1945.
The USA’s threats have much more to do with its strategic rivalry with China than with preventing North Korea from acquiring a nuclear arsenal. Under Trump, as under Barack Obama, the USA is constructing a protection racket over the smaller states of East and South East Asia, along the lines of the existing one in Europe called nato.
us Defense Secretary James Mattis, who previously warned that North Korea faced the “end of its regime and the destruction of its people” if it attacked Washington or its allies, has since claimed that us policy is led by a diplomatic effort under State Secretary Rex Tillerson and un Ambassador Nikki Haley, which is gaining “diplomatic results”. Nicknamed “Mad Dog”, Mattis is plainly not the maddest pooch in the White House kennel.
With whatever differences in rhetoric, this policy therefore continues the “cosh and carrot” diplomacy that has characterised the inter-imperialist rivalry that began under Obama and under George W Bush.
Pyongyang can threaten, too
North Korea has naturally responded with colourful threats of its own. General Kim Rak-gyom, head of North Korea’s Strategic Rocket Forces, said that his country would launch four Hwasong-12 missiles over Japan to land in the sea around Guam, “enveloping” the island. Guam, an unincorporated US territory (effectively a colony) seized from Spain in 1898, is home to the Andersen Air Force Base, the us Pacific Fleet and other military assets, which combined occupy 29 per cent of its territory.
At the same time, The Washington Post conveniently revealed that a previously secret Defense Intelligence Agency analysis claimed that Pyongyang has produced “a miniaturised warhead that can fit inside one of the intercontinental ballistic missiles (icbm) that it has been testing”. If true, this would cross one of Trump’s “red lines”, which in his mind at least would justify an attack on North Korea.
Both sides’ threats and counter-threats therefore contain the very real potential of getting out of hand. The peoples of North and South Korea, indeed of the world, have good cause to fear that Trump’s and Kim’s bombast (and the subsequent need to save face) could drive either to put the other to the ultimate test.
Kim Jong-un, like his father and grandfather, is presented in Western media as a tin pot tyrant whose pursuit of nuclear weaponry demonstrates his megalomania. And his regime certainly is a brutal dictatorship, although it is hardly alone in the world on that count. But far from being “insane”, its nuclear programme is from its own standpoint a rational response to decades of us hostility. A nuclear weapon, and the means to deliver it, offer the regime its only ultimate guarantee of survival.
Pyongyang’s official news outlet spelt out this logic last year, referring to the fate of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq (and the Muammar Gaddafi’s in Libya) as proof that “powerful nuclear deterrence serves as the strongest treasured sword for frustrating outsiders’ aggression”.
That Kim’s regime intends to press ahead with acquiring this deterrent is therefore not in doubt. Once they have “the bomb”, they perhaps calculate that, as with Israel, Pakistan and India, the imperialist powers East and West will then accept a fait accompli, and negotiate some “detente” that allows for a de-escalation and a transfer of scarce resources towards economic development. It is the rapidity of their nuclear programme’s progress that explains the usa’s increased emphasis on demanding an end to such “provocations”, even before Trump.
Both Washington’s and Pyongyang’s escalating rhetoric can therefore be seen as a matter of bluff. For example, even the eye-catching reference to missiles launched around Guam is actually quite carefully worded; depending on what “around Guam” means, it is not quite literally meant as a threat to attack US territory.
Equally, Trump and his advisors know that the first sign of a us attack would bring South Korea’s capital Seoul under immediate North Korean artillery and missile bombardment, and that China would no doubt mobilise its own forces. However, military confrontations can acquire a dynamic of their own. If Trump and his generals think their bluff has been called then their threats could turn into actions, with barely calculable results.
That does not mean giving any political support to Kim Jong-un or to his regime, but rather recognising that any us intervention will not be to bring about “democracy”, and certainly will not bring about peace or stability. Quite the opposite. And for this reason, we should want the defeat of the us aggressions, and call for the removal of all us forces in Korea and in the region.
We should also support the militant trade union and youth movements in South Korea, which have opposed repeatedly the bellicose threats of their own right-wing governments and the usa’s. And the antiwar movement globally should mobilise on the streets to oppose any further threats to attack North Korea.
