Macroscope | Why it may be time for the US to clip North Korea’s wings
It has fallen to President Trump to state the blindingly obvious: a pre-emptive strike could put North Korea’s nuclear programme back a decade
“If China is not going to solve North Korea, we will” – President Donald Trump,
Financial Times,
April 2
It is amazing that it has taken so long. America’s most maverick president facing off against the world’s most capricious head of state. The two snarling dogs of war are locking eyeballs – and I’m not talking about the Xi-Trump summit this weekend.
Anyone who has lived and worked in Seoul knows that they take air raid drills extremely seriously. When the sirens go off, the place locks down and traffic stops in situ. If you are lucky, you find yourself in the basement of a mall where you can repair to the nearest watering hole and wait for the all-clear. If you are not, it is disconcerting to know that you are minutes by fast attack jet from a border where ceasefire has been declared – but never peace.
North Korea has been a running sore in global diplomacy. When Kim Jong-il passed away there were fleeting hopes that his son, Kim Jong-un, might be of a different hue – but he has turned out to be more like a Pharaoh than a dictator. North Korea is run by a man who, like Peter Pan, has never really grown up. Like Peter, he claims questionable greatness. The brutal and public assassination of his half-brother, on someone else’s soil, allegedly by direct order, has hints of a Shakespearean tragedy – Hamlet or Macbeth.
