Ahead of the U.S. election, North Korea’s official mouthpiece, the Korean Central News Agency, issued a blistering message on President Barack Obama’s eight years in power, denouncing the White House’s policies in East Asia. The KCNA article – a “white paper” titled “US collapse is its fate in history” – mocked the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia” and criticized its plans to counter nuclear proliferation.
KCNA, which has referred to the U.S. president as a “wicked black monkey” in the past and described Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s appearance as that of a “pensioner going shopping,” declared over the weekend that the United States is home to a “completely failed regime” that “will certainly be buried.”
Its white paper purported to summarize the failings of U.S. policy – or “imperialist moves” – during Obama’s tenure. It called out U.S. efforts to halt North Korea’s nuclear program, saying they have been consigned to the “cesspool of history” and reflect only Washington’s “ambition for nuclear monopoly.”
It offered some characteristic (and delusional) tough talk: “The Obama administration’s hostile policy toward the DPRK [North Korea] and its strategy for dominating Asia are going totally bankrupt [through] the toughest counteraction of Songun Korea to terminate the empire of evil,” KCNA said, referring to Pyongyang’s formal state ideology.
North Korea has spent years developing its covert nuclear program, much to the alarm and ire of the United States and its Asian allies. The specter of the pariah state’s nukes has hung over the election campaign, with Republican Donald Trump suggesting earlier that he would welcome other friendly countries in the region perhaps obtaining their own atomic weapons – something that flies in the face of decades of Washington policy.
Nuclear proliferation experts who watch North Korea believe the regime is refining its strategic thinking around when it could deploy its nuclear arsenal, moving away from simple Cold War-era deterrence to actually considering using tactical nukes in conventional warfare.
“It looks like North Korea is thinking about what it would look like if they had to use these weapons on their own,” Vipin Narang, a political scientist at MIT, told my colleague Anna Fifield last month. “This program is no longer a joke.”
Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of the Atlantic, this week published a doomsday assessment of how a potential nuclear escalation by Pyongyang could spell disaster under a Trump presidency:
“No country in recent years has consistently thwarted the national security objectives of U.S. presidents in the way that North Korea has. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and their top advisers and negotiators have tried, and failed, to curtail North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. Their failures, though, were of the manageable sort: So far, at least, a misstep by an American president has not led to a nuclear exchange on – or beyond – the Korean peninsula.”
Goldberg adds: “There is nothing in Donald Trump’s record to suggest that he has the self-possession, discipline, analytical sophistication, and capacity to assimilate new information that would allow him to cope with a North Korea-sized challenge.”
(c) 2016, The Washington Post ยท Ishaan Tharoor
