Vol. 81/No. 15 April 17, 2017
SWP: ‘End threats, sanctions against NKorea’
President Donald Trump, who is scheduled to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping April 6, threatened, “If China is not going to solve North Korea, we will.”
“All options are on the table,” a widely quoted but unnamed White House official added. Deputy White House National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland predicted that North Korea might “be able to hit the U.S. with a nuclear-armed missile by the end of the first Trump term.”
From the New York Times to the Anchorage, Alaska, Dispatch News, the test was front-page news in the big-business press. The Washington Post called the 40-mile flight “scary.” Officials in Tokyo and Seoul denounced it.
But the high-tension response was widely out of whack, when the test flight is compared to what Washington, Tokyo, and Seoul have done and are continuing to do to North Korea.
“We reaffirm our commitment to the Korean people’s fight to reunify their country and to end the partition that Washington, with Moscow’s complicity, imposed by bloody force at the end of World War II,” Steve Clark wrote in a Feb. 13 greeting sent to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on behalf of the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party. The occasion was Pyongyang’s Feb. 16 national holiday.
“Washington itself deploys the most massive and deadly submarine, naval, air, and ground-based ballistic missile systems,” Clark said. “Defense Secretary James Mattis visited Seoul and Tokyo to reaffirm the Pentagon’s commitment by the end of 2017 to have in place in South Korea the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile batteries and espionage station, which poses a threat to workers and farmers in Korea, China, and across Asia and the Pacific.”
“End all economic and banking sanctions against the DPRK. US troops, ships, planes and THAAD missiles and radar systems out of Korea,” Clark wrote. “For a Korean Peninsula and Pacific Ocean free of nuclear weapons. Korea is one!”
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