Tag Archives: Kim Jong Un

International news

Don’t meet with the dictator, Mr. President

Donald J. Trump seems to have a fascination with ham-fisted dictators. He relishes praise that comes from the likes of Russia’s Vladimir Putin and says he’d be “honored” to meet with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un “under the right circumstances.”

Let’s set aside the Putin “bromance.” Kim Jong Un doesn’t deserve the attention of the president of the United States.

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has counseled the president to avoid any temptation to sit across a negotiating table with Kim Jong Un. I believe Albright is correct.

North Koreans are starving while Kim Jong Un is squandering resources to build his military machine. Albright said it is wrong in the extreme for the U.S. president to talk to this guy, who’s also threatening potential nuclear attacks on South Korea and possibly Japan.

Trump already has referred to Kim as a “smart cookie,” which isn’t exactly the kind of description a president would apply to the leader of a nation that is still technically at war with his neighbor to the south; North and South Korea, you see, never agreed to a peace treaty when the shooting stopped during the Korean War, a conflict that cost more than 40,000 U.S. lives.

“Smart cookie,” my backside.

As for the “honor” the president would feel if he could meet with Kim under the correct circumstance … don’t go there, Mr. President.

Trump has boasted about his ability to make “great deals” as he seeks to meld his business acumen with his conduct of foreign and domestic public policy. Thus, Trump reckons that he can talk Kim Jong Un into a more reasonable posture in East Asia.

The president’s record of non-achievement — just a little more than 100 days into his presidency — suggests to me that he needs to rethink that particular talking point.

International news

Kim Jong Un is a ‘smart cookie’?

Donald J. Trump is locked in a battle of wits with a young dictator who is threatening to launch a nuclear attack against the United States of America.

So, how does the president refer to Kim Jong Un? He calls him a “smart cookie.”

That is such an interesting term to ascribe to someone who starves his people while spending a grotesquely inordinate amount of money building up North Korea’s conventional weapons arsenal and also while seeking to become a nuclear power.

Trump said on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” “And at a very young age, he was able to assume power. A lot of people, I’m sure, tried to take that power away, whether it was his uncle or anybody else.”

He added: “And he was able to do it. So obviously, he’s a pretty smart cookie.”

Smart cookie. That’s a term one might use to describe, oh, a nephew or niece who’s just been named to a high school honor roll, or perhaps to a small business owner whose company survived a serious economic downturn.

The term “smart cookie” isn’t something most of us would attach to a murderous dictator.

I kind of prefer the president use terms that are a good bit more descriptive, such as, say, “cunning killer,” or “ham-handed tyrant,” or perhaps “ruthless bastard.”

International news

‘Major, major conflict’ possible with North Korea? Oh, brother

Presidents of the United States of America usually don’t say things such as what came out of Donald J. Trump’s mouth today.

The president told Reuters News Agency that there is a possibility of a “major, major conflict” with North Korea, “absolutely.”

Whoa, Mr. President!

He said he prefers a diplomatic solution to North Korean dictator/madman Kim Jong Un’s desire to become a nuclear power. Good. So does the rest of the civilized world.

What is the president trying to do? Is he trying to goad Kim Jong Un into doing something extremely foolish? Is he trying to provoke the dictator to send missiles into South Korea, where roughly 30,000 American troops are stationed as part of a defense garrison?

Presidents must be required to be circumspect. They must not be seen as provoking enemy states to act with extreme violence.

Donald J. Trump doesn’t understand any of it. He has made a dangerous, reckless statement.

I am now going to hold my breath.

military news

USS Carl Vinson isn’t MIA, however …

Where, oh where, is the USS Carl Vinson, a Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier thought to be heading toward the Korean Peninsula?

Not so fast, mates. The massive ship and the warships comprising its battle group aren’t exactly en route to the trouble spot.

This brings to mind yet another question about the commander in chief: Does the president know about which he speaks when it concerns the most powerful military apparatus the world has known?

Donald J. Trump told Fox News business correspondent Maria Bartiromo that the Vinson group, which he described as a “great armada,” was on its way to the region in a massive show of force against North Korean communist dictator/madman/goofball Kim Jong Un.

Except that it wasn’t.

The USS Carl Vinson was headed toward the Indian Ocean to perform military exercises with the Australian navy.

The U.S. Navy doesn’t comment on the precise location of its warships, so don’t expect the Pentagon to blow the Carl Vinson’s cover. This does illustrate nevertheless that the president once again has blabbed before knowing the facts.

You want unpredictability? This is it.

Trump has said he is determined to be as “unpredictable” as possible as it regards our adversaries. He doesn’t want to telegraph his next move, particularly when it regards potential military action.

The president says every option “is on the table” regarding Kim Jong Un. Fine. I get it.

Unpredictability, though, shouldn’t include hearing the president declare that a heavily armed naval strike force is steaming toward harm’s way when it in fact is moving in the opposite direction.

Or, has the president offered the world yet another definition of the word “is”?

https://highplainsblogger.com/2017/04/enter-the-uss-carl-vinson/

 

International news

How might Trump persuade China to lean on North Korea?

This holy weekend seems like an odd time to comment on the possibility — remote as it seems at this moment — of nuclear war with North Korea.

Here goes anyway.

How might Donald J. Trump have sought to persuade Chinese President Xi Jinping to lean hard on North Korean dictator/madman Kim Jong Un?

Trump met with Xi this past weekend at the president’s posh Mar-a-Lago resort, where he said he was enjoying that piece of chocolate cake when he told Xi of the Syrian air strike.

I’m pretty sure, though, that North Korea came up. What might have Trump have told Xi? How might he have pleaded with him to do something — anything within reason — to persuade Kim Jong Un to avoid testing a nuclear device?

China is North Korea’s major economic benefactor. The People’s Republic is North Korea’s No. 1 trading partner. There would seem to be plenty of economic muscle that Xi could apply to Kim Jong Un to tell him — in no uncertain terms — that threatening the United States, South Korea and Japan is sincerely not in North Korea’s best interests.

Let’s remember, too, that North Korea is a desperately poor nation. Its people are starving while Kim Jong Un keeps spending nearly a quarter of the country’s GDP on military hardware.

The U.S. Navy is sending a strike group led by the USS Carl Vinson — a nuclear-powered attack aircraft carrier — to the Korean Peninsula. It’s a tremendous show of American military power that must not go unnoticed in Pyongyang.

Is the U.S. president capable of appealing to Xi to lay it all on the table with Kim Jong Un? Is he able to use the kind of language heads of state use with each other when talking about serious threats to international security? After all, whatever threat the North Koreans pose doesn’t just involve the United States, or China or any other single nation in the east Asia region. This is a worldwide matter.

My hope would be that Trump would plead Xi — if that’s what it would take — to lean very, very hard on Kim Jong Un, to tell him about the terrible price the world would pay if he pushes the United States to where many observers fear might occur.

That would be a pre-emptive strike on North Korean military targets.

Trump vows to “take care” of North Korea “alone” if China doesn’t do what it must. I do hope — and pray — the president is able to persuade the Chinese leader to step up.

military news

Enter the USS Carl Vinson

I heard the news of a Navy carrier battle group heading toward the Korean Peninsula and took special note of the aircraft carrier leading the group.

It’s the USS Carl Vinson, a Nimitz-class nuclear-powered beast with which I have some limited familiarity.

I don’t know, of course, what all this means overall. North Korean madman/dictator Kim Jong Un is rattling his sabre yet again. He’s launching missiles into the Sea of Japan and threatening war against South Korea, Japan and maybe even the United States.

So the Carl Vinson battle group is heading toward the peninsula in a show of strength.

I received a marvelous assignment in 1993 at the invitation of the late U.S. Rep. Charles Wilson, an East Texas Democrat who was a huge supporter of military affairs. I was editorial page editor of the Beaumont Enterprise at the time and our paper circulated deeply into Wilson’s 2nd Congressional District.

He invited me to join him on a tour of the Carl Vinson, which at the time was home-ported at San Diego, Calif. The ship was at sea at the time of Wilson’s invitation. I asked my editor if I could go; he said “yes.” The paper purchased my plane ticket and I flew to San Diego to meet with Wilson and his congressional party.

We landed on the Carl Vinson and spent three days and nights aboard ship. Rep. Wilson spent time talking to pilots, deck crew members, machinists, cooks. He told all of them how much he appreciated the work they did and the service they performed in defense of the nation.

By the way, you have not lived until you’ve been through a tailhook landing and a catapult launch off the deck of an aircraft carrier. Believe me, there is nothing in this entire world quite like either experience.

During a tour of the flight deck, the skipper of the ship at the time, Capt. John Payne, told us of the immense firepower contained on the ships comprising the battle group.

He then said something quite astonishing. He said the group — which comprised several warships, including cruisers, destroyers and frigates as well as support craft along with this monstrous carrier — contained more explosive firepower than all the ordnance dropped during World War II.

Of course, that prompted the question from yours truly: “Skipper, does that mean this ship is carrying nukes?” Capt. Payne looked me in the eye and said, “Now you know I can’t answer that question.”

OK. Got it.

Twenty-four years later, the USS Carl Vinson is still on active duty. It’s now heading for a potentially very dangerous zone. I do believe the ship and its massive crew will be ready for whatever occurs.

International news

North Korea: most dangerous worldwide threat?

Let’s turn our attention for a moment or two to North Korea and its lunatic leader, Kim Jong Un.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the other day that military action against North Korea is “on the table” if Kim decides to do something foolish, such as launch a missile in the direction of the United States or one of our allies, such as, say, Japan or South Korea.

I guess it’s always been understood that military action would be an option for the United States. However, for the secretary of state to tell Kim Jong Un out loud and to put this guy on alert seems to me to be a dangerous potential gambit.

I’ve noted already that Kim may be nuts, but he ain’t stupid.

It’s the nuttiness that should cause us all grave concern.

North Korea has more than a million of its citizens in the military. The country has a total population of around 25 million. It spends far more than it can afford on its military apparatus.

Do you wonder what a guy like Kim would do to avoid a war with the United States? Look at this way: A leader who would allow his people to starve to death, to subject them to famine and to deny them health care just so he can build a military machine is capable of just about any act of idiocy imaginable.

Yeah, this guy is a frightening individual.

I am not sure whether Tillerson thinks his talk about the “military option” is going to persuade Kim Jong Un that a fight against the United States is not winnable.

My hope would be that it would give Kim pause. My fear is quite different. I fear he might conclude that a U.S. attack would finish the destruction of his country that he and his communist forebears have begun.

How in the world does one analyze what goes through what passes for this individual’s mind?

My next question is this: Does the president of the United States and his national security team have the moxie and savvy to contain this guy?

International news, national news, political news

Gov. Johnson needs to study up on foreign affairs

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The world’s most indispensable nation needs a leader who is well-versed on the world that surrounds it.

The United States of America remains the greatest nation on Earth, despite the ridiculous assertions of Donald J. Trump that we’ve become something significantly less than that. Accordingly, whoever becomes president needs to understand the principals involved in some of the world’s greatest trouble spots.

Libertarian nominee for president Gary Johnson flunked that knowledge test yet again.

Sigh …

He asked an interviewer “What’s Aleppo?” He didn’t know that Syria’s largest city is the epicenter of the hideous refugee crisis that has engulfed so much of the Middle East and Europe.

Then, when asked by another TV interviewer to name a single foreign leader he liked and/or respected, he couldn’t name one.

The latest gaffe came when Gov. Johnson was asked to name North Korea’s leader. He couldn’t come up with Kim Jong Un.

One of the tests of leadership in this country must include knowledge of far more than such basic information.

An exceptional nation needs to have exceptional leadership at its helm. Two of the four people running for the presidency — GOP nominee Trump and Johnson — are flunking the leadership test. I won’t speak yet to the knowledge base owned by the Green Party nominee for president, Jill Stein.

The fourth candidate is Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. She has demonstrated that she fully prepared to assume the role of president of the world’s greatest nation.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/gary-johnson-couldnt-name-north-koreas-leader-kim-jong-un/ar-BBx3t5v

national news, political news

Presidents should speak precisely … and with clarity

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I am not going to ascribe some nefarious motive behind what Donald J. Trump said about the Second Amendment and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

I do not know what he meant when he said “Second Amendment people” might take care of Clinton if she’s elected president and appoints judges who might be unfriendly to gun owners’ rights.

The Republican presidential nominee has come under withering criticism for seemingly — according to some folks — suggesting someone should actually harm the Democratic presidential nominee.

The troubling aspect up front for me is the lack of clarity and precision that keeps pouring out of Trump’s pie hole when he makes statements such as his latest stumble-bum utterance.

He wants to be president of the United States, allegedly.

That means he must follow a number of rules associated with being head of state and government.

One of them has to be to speak with absolute clarity all the time.

I’m trying to imagine Trump letting slip some ridiculous assertion about a world leader or an international trouble spot that gets lost in the translation. These things do happen, you know.

What if, for example, he repeats his belief that Japan and South Korea should be able to develop nukes as a defense against North Korea? How is that tinhorn despot Kim Jong Un going to interpret it? Would he then, on a whim, decide to attack South Korea believing that his peninsula neighbors are about to explode a nuclear device?

The kind of loose and careless talk — which is what he exhibited with his Second Amendment remarks in North Carolina — cannot be tolerated in someone who presents himself as a serious candidate for the U.S. presidency.

International news

Note to Kim Jong Un: Study up on ‘MAD’ doctrine

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I have used this blog on occasion to question North Korea’s fruitcake/dictator’s sanity on judgment, but not — necessarily — his intelligence.

Still, someone in Pyongyang needs to take the young man aside and explain the MAD doctrine to him.

The letters “MAD” comprise an acronym, meaning “mutually assured destruction.”

The United States and the Soviet Union understood its implications.

If one country were to launch a nuclear strike against the other — or its allies — then all hell would break loose. Both sides would be destroyed. Gone! Obliterated.

Now, though, Kim Jong Un says he won’t use nukes unless his country’s sovereignty is threatened.

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news-other-foreign-policy/279172-kim-jong-un-north-korea-ready-to-improve

Even that caveat makes any thought using nukes, well, rather MAD … don’t you think?

It’s important to note that he is the lone leader of a nuclear state that keeps referencing the potential use of nukes. Does the People’s Republic of China say anything about it? How about the United States? Or Russia?

Oh, wait! I almost forgot! Presumed GOP presidential nominee Donald J. Trump has said he wouldn’t oppose Japan or South Korea developing nuclear arsenals as a hedge against North Korea.

That, too, is MAD.

It’s simply in Kim Jong Un’s best interest — really and truly — to consider the implications of what MAD means.