The summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un was pretty much all symbols and no solid content — basically it’s an agreement to talk further with plenty of wiggle room for either side to back out later. But that said it was a striking departure from the gutless and arrogant refusal of 11 prior presidents to make any move towards ending the state of war between the US and North Korea during the 65 years since fighting ended in the bloody Korean War with an armistice in place back in 1953.
Kudos to both Trump and Kim for that.Odds are that even if North Korea doesn’t get rid of its nuclear weapons, ultimately the US will have to grin and bear it because South Korea looks ready to sign, either on a four-party basis with the US and China, or bilaterally on its own with just North Korea, a peace treaty ending one of the last relics of the Cold War that began with the end of World War II and the division of Korea, Vietnam and Germany into two parts.
If the pro-peace president of South Korea, Moon Jae-in, signs a peace agreement with North Korea’s Kim, it eliminates any justification for the US continuing to keep military bases in South Korea, where 32,000 US soldiers are still stationed as a “trip-wire” in the "event of an invasion from the north". At that point the US shall lose all leverage for trying to pressure North Korea to eliminate its recently developed nuclear bomb arsenal.
The idea of a neutral Korean peninsula with no US bases is surely horrifying to the neo-conservative strategists of Russia and China containment like Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton, a chicken-hawk war monger who’s never met a war he didn’t like or even promote. But for Koreans and the broader peoples of Asia, getting the US out of Korea would be a blessing. It would remove a crucial component of any potential US first strike against China — the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-ballistic missile launch systems recently installed in South Korea on the bogus justification that they are guarding against North Korean missiles. (Any North Korean missiles aimed at South Korea would necessarily have low-altitude trajectories because of the short distance to target, and would not be vulnerable to THAAD missiles.)
Furthermore, once North and South Korea signed a peace treaty, it would eliminate any ratioale for the still-in-force UN Security Council Resolution 82, a measure which authorized the US-led UN defense of South Korea in 1950 and which has continued to provide the fig leaf of legal cover for America’s continuing colonial domination of South Korea ever since. Even if the US were to continue to veto moves to revoke that Security Council resolution, it would be seen as meaningless with the war officially over.
Surely this was not the intention of President Trump in meeting with Kim, but let him have his moment. Because he desperately needed something positive in the foreign affairs realm to show for his now bumptious, goof-ball 18-month-old presidency, he had to reach an agreement of some kind with North Korea, and now he’s gotten that. The agreement is going to turn out well, too, even if not the way he’d have intended. If President Moon now nominates him and Kim for the Nobel Peace Prize, as he has suggested, they’ll deserve it at least as much as war criminal Henry Kissinger (awarded the prize in 1973 jointly with his North Vietnamese counterpart Le Duc Tho who unlike Kissinger at least had the decency to decline it) and Israel’s Menachim Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat — and surely far more than his predecessor Barack Obama, who proceeded, upon collecting his medal, to ramp up the Afghanistan War yet again, to invade Libya, overthrowing the government there, to meddle in Syria and threaten that country with a missile blitz, to support Israel's genocidal policy and to launch more deadly drone and Special Forces targeted murder attacks against people in numerous sovereign nations than the Bush/Cheney administration ever did.
Corporate polititians and journalists along with hardline neo-conservatives can rant that Trump has told out US imperial interests. They clearly prefer an eternal state of war, since it's good for the US war machine and for the arms industry that feeds off it. But endless war plicy, whether in Europe, Asia or the Middle East, hasn't benn good for anyone else, around the world or in the US.
The interrelated issues of respecting the dignity and sovereignty of the North Korean nation and engaging in an authentic process of de-colonization are precisely why the U.S.-North Korean initiative will fail without a major intervention on the part of the people in the United States demanding that their leaders commit to diplomacy and peace.
There should be no illusions about U.S. intentions. If U.S. policymakers were really concerned with putting a brake on the North Korean nuclear-weapons program, they would have pursued a different set of policies. Such policies would have created the necessary security conditions to convince the North Koreans that a nuclear deterrence to the United States was unnecessary.
The fact that those conditions were not created were less a result of the evil intentions of the North Koreans. than it reflected the need to maintain the justification for continued U.S. military deployment in South Korea and in the region. Being able to point to North Korea as a threat to regional security has provided the justifications for U.S. power projection in the region and the ever-expanding U.S. military budget.
With the growing power of China over the last few decades, the threat of North Korea allowed the United States to continue a physical presence right at the underbelly of China. That is why the “agreed framework” under Clinton was not implemented and then jettisoned by the Bush administration. It is also why the Obama administration’s so-called strategic patience was really about a series of increasingly provocative military exercises and no negotiations.
That is why the historic record is replete with the United States sabotaging negotiated settlements with the North, but then pointing to North Korean responses to those efforts as evidence of North Korean duplicity.
In addition to the material interests and hegemonic geopolitical objectives, the social-psychological phenomenon of inculcated white supremacy is also a factor and has buttressed imperial policies toward that nation for years.
For example, the psychopathology of Western supremacy invisibilizes the absurdity and illegitimacy of the United States being in a position to negotiate the fate of millions of Koreans. The great “white father” and savior complex is not even a point of contestation because it is not even perceived–the rule of whiteness through the dominance of the Western capitalist elite has been naturalized.
Therefore, it is quite understandable that for many, the summit is the space where the North Koreans are essentially supposed to surrender to the United States. It is beyond the comprehension of most policymakers and large sectors of the public that North Koreans would have ever concluded it is not in their national interest to give up their defenses to a reckless and dangerously violent rogue state that sees itself beyond the law.
And it is that strange white-supremacist consciousness that buys into the racist trope that it was Trump’s pressure that brought North Korea to the table. The white-supremacist colonial mentality believes the natives will only respond to force and violence.
As U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), the good old boy from South Carolina, argues “The only way North Korea will give up their nuclear program is if they believe military option is real.”
But as Kim Kye Gwan, North Korea’s first vice minister for foreign affairs and former nuclear-program negotiator pointed out in relationship to the reasons why North Korea stayed with the process: “The U.S. is miscalculating the magnanimity and broad-minded initiatives of the DPRK as signs of weakness and trying to embellish and advertise as if these are the product of its sanctions and pressure.”
Unfortunately, the white-supremacist world-view renders it almost impossible to apprehend reality in any other way. That is why it is inevitable that the Trump administration—like the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations—will mis-read the North Koreans.
The North Korea issue is a classic example of why it is impossible to separate a pro-peace, anti-war position from the issue of anti-imperialism. The concrete, geopolitical objectives of U.S. imperialist interests in the region drives the logic of regional dominance, which means peace, de-colonization and national reconciliation for Korea are counter to U.S. interests. And while we must support the U.S. state’s decision to halt military exercises, we must recognize that without vigorous pressure from the people to support an honest process, the possibility of conflict might be ever more alive now as a result of the purported attempt at diplomacy.
The nature of the North Korean state is not the issue. What is the issue is a process has begun between the two Korean nations that should be respected. Therefore, de-nuclearization should not be the focus—self-determination of the Korean peoples must be the center of our discussions. On that issue, it is time for activists in the United States to demand the United States get out of Korea. The peace and anti-war movement must support a process that will lead to the closure of U.S. military bases, the withdrawal of U.S. troops and the elimination of the nuclear threat.
PALESTINA
Remembering the Nakba
Remembering the Nakba
The United Nations has been busy attempting, with little efficacy, to address Israeli violence toward Palestine. On June 1, ten members of the Security Council voted in favor of a resolution that would have helped protect Palestinians from Israeli violence, and would have criticized that violence. Four members abstained, and the United States, of course, vetoed the resolution. Later that same day, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., the incompetent and clown-like Nikki Haley, introduced legislation that would have condemned Hamas for its purported violence. The only nation that voted to support that resolution was the United States; this may have been the first time in U.N. history that a resolution was introduced in the Security Council that gained only a single vote, and that by the nation that introduced it.
On the very day that the U.S. opened its embassy to Israel in Jerusalem, in defiance of nearly the entire international community, Israel killed at least 60 unarmed Palestinian protestors. Haley has made a variety of statements concerning the protests, which are worth examining. We will look at just a few here.
“Those who suggest the violence has anything to do with the embassy in Jerusalem is sorely mistaken….”
Palestinians have been protesting at the border since March, demanding that they be granted the internationally-recognized right of return; this means that those Palestinians who were driven from their homes at any time since the Nakba (catastrophe; the expulsion of three-quarters of a million Palestinians and the slaughter of thousands more to establish the ‘nation’ of Israel) have the legal right to return to their homes, or be compensated for the loss if the homes are no longer standing. The protestors planned to culminate their protest on the day that the U.S. violated international law and opened its embassy in Jerusalem. On that day, Israelis killed dozens and dozens of unarmed protestors. The violence perpetrated by Israel upon defenseless Palestinians is very much connected with the embassy move. The source of that violence is Israel.
“…rather it comes from people who will not accept Israel in any part of Israel.”
One must ask if Haley has absolutely no concept of reality. Does she really believe this? Does she think that Palestinians are living in freedom and prosperity, but demonstrate against Israel because they “will not accept Israel in any part of Israel”? It isn’t even that Palestinians will not accept Israel in any part of Palestine. It is that Palestinians will not accept a brutal occupation; the continuing demolition of their homes and theft of their lands. They will not accept arrests and long detentions of men, women and children without charge. They will not accept being denied access to their own farmlands for planting and harvesting; they will not accept countless checkpoints, arbitrarily opened and closed by Israeli soldier-terrorists. They will not accept rationing their water, while Israel accesses Palestinian water sources to fill their swimming pools. They will not accept electricity for only a few hours a day, because Israel has bombed their power plants.
“They light kites to cause as much destruction as possible.”
If it were possible for anyone to take Haley seriously before, surely she is now dismissed universally as an ignorant buffoon. Palestinians are lighting fire to “kites to cause as much destruction as possible.” This is in response to Israeli sharpshooters, shooting medics who are clearly marked as such. Flaming kites are in response to drones, tear gas, sniper fire and all the violence that Israel seems to take such pleasure in raining down on the Palestinians. Does Haley believe that the sight of a burning kite causes mass terror among Israeli soldiers? Does she believe that the entire city of Tel Aviv is in grave dangers, because a kite that has been set on fire approaches, or even crosses, Israel’s border?
Does she not see that Palestinians might feel terror when, in the West Bank, Israeli soldiers break into their homes at any hour of the day or night, ransack and loot them, and carry away all the males over the age of 12? Does she have no empathy or sympathy for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip whose homes are periodically bombed by Israel? Does she feel nothing for those who flee to clearly-marked United Nations refugee centers, only to be bombed there? Has she no compassion when Israeli soldiers attempt to arrest children under the age of ten?
Is she without any knowledge of international law, human rights, or even basic human decency?
The world has grown tired of all this, even if Israel and the U.S. seem to relish it. While the recent resolution passed by the General Assembly is non-binding, it does serve to further tarnish Israel’s already blackened reputation, and further isolate it, and the United States, on the world stage.
Sadly, however, the worldwide condemnation of Israel changes nothing on the ground for Palestinians. In the Gaza Strip, Palestinians still live in abject poverty; they are unable to export their goods, or import much needed building and medical supplies. They continue to be shot at, and sometimes killed, and have their boats ‘confiscated’ (read: stolen), by Israeli terrorists, when fishing well within the internationally-recognized Palestinians waters. In the West Bank, they still must deal with checkpoints, brutal and often fatal harassment by illegal Israeli settlers, and all the horror that accompanies the actions of the brutal Israeli apartheid regime.
Change will only come for the Palestinians when the world’s people finally say ‘Enough!’. When those in the U.S. defeat elected officials who are owned by Israeli lobbies, and when either one of the two major political parties supports the Palestinians, or another party grows in sufficient strength to effectively do so.
The U.S. and Israel are losing influence in the world; the actions of their two heads of state, the erratic and delusional U.S. President Donald Trump, and the violent and racist Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, are accelerating this.
Unfortunately, like a once-powerful animal that has been mortally wounded, their violence may increase in direct proportion to their waning influence. Cooler heads of state must work to prevent a worldwide catastrophe at the hands of these two rogue, violent regimes.
Interview with Ahed Tamini's father (5')
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