The US–North Korean Crisis

United States (US) President Donald Trump seldom operates with any sense of moderation or restraint. The first international destination in his first presidential visit to Asia in November this year was Japan, which he chose to begin with a round of golf with the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. With Abe trying to push through an amendment of the Japanese constitution to rid that charter of its pacifist content, especially Article 9 (which outlaws war as a means of settling international disputes involving the state), the US military–industrial complex expects to strike huge armament export deals, US missile defence systems to begin with. In the talks that followed the round of golf, naturally then, North Korea occupied a “great deal of time.” At the press conference, Abe reaffirmed that with regard to North Korea, “Japan and US are 100% together.” And Trump, as one already knows, never tires of reiterating, as part of the US threat to North Korea, that “all options” are on the ­table—war and nuclear weapons, obviously included.

Addressing South Korea’s National Assembly on his next international destination, Trump was a picture and voice of reactionary abandon and incitement in his condemnation of North Korea. Such demonisation is however not new—it has been a constant refrain of US foreign policy towards northern Korea since September 1945 when the US occupation forces arrived in southern Korea. Just a month before, in August 1945, the ­Russian Red Army had entered Korea and completed the Japanese surrender by mid-August. But for some reason, the Soviet Union accepted its World War II ally’s request to hold back the Red Army at the 38th Parallel. In early September, before the arrival of the US forces, a national conference in Seoul had ­proclaimed the People’s Republic of Korea, with decentralised “people’s committees” in-charge. This was accepted by most of the Korean people, and by the Soviet forces in the north.