The Korean peninsula is on the brink of war and it is Kim Jung Il’s communist government that is behind it. One can only think that the “Dear Leader” has lost it or perhaps the inmates are running the asylum. In recent weeks and months, North Korea has gone rogue. The North has threatened to shoot down civilian aircraft flying near their airspace. They have test fired short, medium, and long range missiles that are capable of carrying tactical nuclear payloads while, at the same time, conducting underground nuclear tests. And, to add insult to injury and escalate an already intense situation, they announced the end of the 1953 armistice this week; the very armistice that ended the Korean War and created the DMZ.
To say that North Korea has gone rogue is an understatement and we have but one man to thank for it: George W. Bush. It was in 2002 that then-President Bush referred to North Korea as part of the ‘Axis of Evil’ in his State of Union address. It was not too soon thereafter that the North started its march towards reigniting a decades old conflict that could possibly lead to a worldwide conflict or worse, a nuclear holocaust.
Although it is good to examine why events occur so as to prevent them in the future, the question now becomes: how do we get the horse back in the barn? How do we get a nuclear-armed North Korea, with the 5th largest Army in the world, to behave? And, to make matters worse, North Korea is fully aware that our armed forces are stretched thin with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The North’s next move may very well be to begin a march toward Seoul. Although traversing the DMZ would be exceedingly difficult, the South would eventually be overwhelmed. It would leave us with two options. The first would be to somehow persuade China to get involved in stopping North Korea with either the threat of force or the actual use of force. The second would be to use strategic tactical nuclear weapons. It just isn’t possible to get the needed forces to Korea fast enough to make use of conventional weapons; and, even if it were possible, any buildup of forces would likely spark the conflict we seek to prevent in the first place. The second is one we really need to avoid if at all possible, but it speaks to the very quandary we find ourselves in. No matter what, the Obama Administration is going to need to leverage a significant amount of international goodwill it has built up in order to stop the North from creating a situation which could very well trigger World War III. Right now, everyone is downplaying this. I can only hope that our intelligence communities, diplomats, and the Obama Administration are taking this very seriously and are coming up with a sound plan of action and executing on it in order to avert what could potentially develop into a very serious problem.