Henry Kissinger Warns Against Unilateral War With North Korea
Via a reader tip comes Henry Kissinger’s concerns about a preemptive strike against North Korea:
While he said he agrees with the aggressive statements President Trump has fired at North Korea, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger warned Congress last week against potential military intervention near Russian and Chinese borders without the world’s support.
The Trump administration has signaled that North Korea would be crossing a red line if it developed nuclear capability for its intercontinental ballistic missile program. Yet some policy officials and military experts claim that North Korea has already crossed that line, or is at least very close to attaching nuclear warheads to its missiles.
Kissinger offered his thoughts on the impending “fork in the road,” in which the administration may consider pre-emptive military action or increasingly tighter sanctions against the regime.
“We will hit that fork in the road, and the temptation to deal with it with a pre-emptive attack is strong, and the argument is rational, but I have seen no public statement by any leading official,” Nixon’s secretary of State told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “But in any event, my own thinking, I would be very concerned by any unilateral American war at the borders of China and Russia, in which we are not supported by a significant part of the world, or at least of the Asian world.” [PJ Media]
You can read more at the link, but Kissinger also is concerned that South Korea and Japan will develop their own nuclear weapons stockpiles.
When Nixon was president, he and Kissinger had a plan to use nuclear weapons against North Korea. The didn’t want to start another war in Asia because of the unpopularity of VietNam. At the time we had Nike, Honest John, Sergeant missiles, and beleive me, something even more powerful than all of the above over there. China was more afraid of the capabilities of the Sergeant. I found a declassified document on line outlining the U.S.’s nuclear policy for Korea, but I didn’t back up my computer and it crashed and I lost everything. We had the opportunity to finish what the North started, but didn’t take that chance.
Henry should read more Tennyson and less Huffington Post.
Trump and his Defense and Foreign Policy team are probably more well-equipped to deal with fascists, communists, ne’er-do-wells, and the likes of North Korea than Kissinger, who (though obviously much better at this modern version of The Great Game than me) lost his shirt playing poker with Ho Chi Min in the early 1970s and should have retired soon after.
Tennyson: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45392/ulysses and https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45321/crossing-the-bar
The Great Game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Game