In Rare Display of Real News Washington Post Op-Ed Commends President Trump’s North Korean Strategy

A recent Washington Post opinion piece by Michael Hirsh details the President’s take on North Korea and the impending nuclear weapons showdown that is bound to occur within a year, citing Trump’s “bad-cop” approach as the only one that we have yet to try – and it might work.

Many political figures have feigned fear following the many jabs that the President has hurled toward the Hermit Kingdom’s absurdist dictator, Kim Jong-Un, from “Little Rocket Man” to “fire-and-fury”, the President has no time for the reckless behavior coming out of North Korea, and the world should take notice.

As Hirsh points out via David Albright, the head of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, “Go back three or four years, and no one thought [North Korea] would be able to do an ICBM this decade, let alone put a warhead on it . . . it’ll take maybe within six months, 12 months” to put a nuclear warhead on the missile.

Hirsh points his readers to an Oct. 1 tweet by the President wherein he stated that “being nice to Rocket Man hasn’t worked in 25 years, why would it work now? Clinton failed, Bush failed, and Obama failed.”

And he’s right . . . We have witnessed nearly a quarter-century of failed negotiations by administrations from both sides of the aisle, and yet nothing has changed except for the heating up of a decades old conflict.

North Korea, as Hirsh points out, uses their nuclear program, and they stated aim of dismantling it, as a bargaining chip to receive Western aid, and rather than actually stopping after receiving the aid, they persist with their asinine nuclear aspirations. Now, though, their aspirations are far from asinine and we are close to witnessing a fully nuclear-capable North Korea.

The President is a true, honest-to-god strategist, and we have witnessed this in the form of his “crazy guy” personae. He is allowing Rex Tillerson to bargain internationally while using the President himself as a threat – this is textbook Trump. An Axios article from Oct. 1 confirms this thought, and Hirsh, unlike many others in the political media world (or politics in general, for that matter) seems to be the only person applying this logic to other realms of Trump’s global posturing.

Hirsh writes:

North Korea’s threat to the United States is not static; it is ratcheting up dangerously with new nuclear, missile and miniaturization technology that for the first time will allow Pyongyang to reach U.S. shores. This alone argues for a new approach. If the president can avoid triggering a preemptive war (a nightmarish prospect that should be dealt with carefully), then his tough rhetoric could force Kim to reckon with an outcome beyond sanctions, which haven’t changed his course and almost certainly will not in the future.

At the end of the piece, Hirsh, again by way of Albright, notes that Trump’s strategy will ultimately force the hand of China to reign in North Korea and keep them from unleashing a beast much more volatile than a tiny, Hermit Kingdom, and that beast is the President of the United States.

 

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