North Korean leader Kim Jong Un (C) watches a long range rocket launch into the air in North Korea, in this photo released by Kyodo February 7, 2016. Mandatory credit REUTERS/Kyodo
Tom Malinowski, Politico: How to Take Down Kim Jong Un
Stop saying there are no good options on North Korea. Here’s how we can end the threat once and for all—without firing a shot.
At my Senate confirmation hearing a few years ago, I made a promise to the panel deciding my fate: never to use the phrase “there are no good options.” After all, if there were obvious solutions to the hardest—and most interesting—problems we face in the world, they would already have been found. Our job in the U.S. government—I served in the State Department as an assistant secretary focused on human
rights—was not to make excuses in such situations, but to use whatever inherently limited tools we had to try to make things better, and to avoid making them worse.
North Korea tests this proposition like nothing else. Since its latest provocative missile test, thoughtful observers have pointed out that neither sanctions nor diplomacy are likely to dissuade Kim Jong Un from deploying nuclear weapons that can reach the United States, that we cannot depend on China to stop him for us, but that the alternative of a military strike on North Korea could cause a war that would lay waste to our ally South Korea. When it comes to North Korea, the phrase “there are no good options” has become a mantra.
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WNU Editor: I concur with this commentary. Having access to information on the outside world helped to bring about change in the Soviet Union and China .... it will also help in changing North Korea. The question that remains unanswered is .... how long and what will happen when that day finally comes.
North Korea tests this proposition like nothing else. Since its latest provocative missile test, thoughtful observers have pointed out that neither sanctions nor diplomacy are likely to dissuade Kim Jong Un from deploying nuclear weapons that can reach the United States, that we cannot depend on China to stop him for us, but that the alternative of a military strike on North Korea could cause a war that would lay waste to our ally South Korea. When it comes to North Korea, the phrase “there are no good options” has become a mantra.
Read more ....
WNU Editor: I concur with this commentary. Having access to information on the outside world helped to bring about change in the Soviet Union and China .... it will also help in changing North Korea. The question that remains unanswered is .... how long and what will happen when that day finally comes.
