4 Ways out of the Korean Crisis

The National Interest

. . . "Yet, the main responsibility for today’s awful predicament on the Korean Peninsula must fall squarely on the George W. Bush administration that recklessly linked North Korea to the 9/11 attacks and sent Kim Jong-un’s father on a headlong rush for the bomb that culminated four years later in Pyongyang’s initial nuclear test. In an ironic and dangerously perverse twist of fate, some of the same incautious thinkers that dreamed up and pressed the “Axis of Evil” doctrine in the first place are now in positions of influence regarding the present crisis. The press was all too busy unraveling the fiasco of the Iraq War to ascertain its second order effects in Northeast Asia, much less to call to account those responsible. Is it any wonder that President Donald Trump’s speech before the UN in September had an eerie similarity in tone to Bush’s infamous 2002 speech? By now, Americans are quite sick and tired of neoconservative bromides that make for ringing rhetoric, but have had disastrous policy outcomes. However, to put disasters into true perspective, a new Korean War would quite obviously make the Iraq War look like a garden picnic." . . .