A dispatch from teleSUR, a fraternal site.
Published 2 August 2017
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“We do not seek a regime change, we do not seek the collapse of the regime, we do not seek an accelerated reunification of the peninsula, we do not seek an excuse to send our military north of the 38th parallel,” Tillerson told reporters on Tuesday.
The former ExxonMobil executive said that the U.S. wants to try and tell North Korea that “we are not your enemy... we are not your threat.”
If that is indeed the U.S.'s goal, other officials taking a less conciliatory tone might not have received the memo. On Tuesday, according to CNN, U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham said “if there's going to be a war to stop them, it will be over there. If thousands die, they're going to die over there, they're not going to die here and (President Donald Trump) told me that to my face... I'm saying (military options) are inevitable if North Korea continues.”
Tillerson did make it clear that any dialogue will have to take place under the conditions that “there is no future where North Korea holds nuclear weapons.” The DPRK leadership has maintained that nuclear capabilities are necessary to stave off a potential U.S. attempt at regime change. The countries have remained in a technical state of war since the conflict known in the U.S. as the Korean War did not end with a peace treaty. The war left much of North Korea's cities and infrastructure destroyed, and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians.
The U.S. Air Force tested an unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) on Wednesday morning, launching it off the coast of California, a move which they specifically said was “not a response to recent North Korean actions.”
In addition to frequent threats of a possible “military option,” the U.S. has also used the heightened tensions on the Korean peninsula to ramp up economic threats against the growing global power-house, China.
President Trump took to Twitter this week to saying he is “very disappointed in China” for supposedly doing “nothing” about the DPRK. “China could easily solve this problem!” the president said.
China rejected the accusations, with an editorial in Chinese state media, the China Daily, saying that “Trump is wrong in his assumption that Beijing can single handedly settle the matter. As Beijing has said, repeatedly, it does not have the kind of 'control' over Pyongyang that the U.S. President believes it does.”
In addition to frequent threats of a possible “military option,” the U.S. has also used the heightened tensions on the Korean peninsula to ramp up economic threats against the growing global power-house, China.
[premium_newsticker id=”154171″]Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report
