How to Denuke North Korea

During President Trump’s visit to The New York Times in mid-November after his election victory, he referred to a “big problem for the country” that President Obama had brought to his attention during their 90-minute meeting at the White House. All confidential indications are the reference was to North Korea.

“We can’t play games with him,” Trump said during the presidential campaign, referring to North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. “Because he really does have missiles, and he really does have nukes.”

The Trump administration will be defined by what it does rather than by what it says.

The “Map of Death” photograph released by North Korea in 2013 displayed four U.S. targets: the Pacific Fleet in San Diego, the Air Force Global Strike Command in Louisiana, Naval Station Pearl Harbor and Washington D.C.

Writing this blog from Los Angeles, I can’t help thinking that LA is an ideal target for a surprise attack. Its’ 4,850 square miles sprawl is an easy mark for an inaccurately fired ICBM that can take out millions of people instead of missing a much smaller military target, or being shot down. After all, LA is the headquarters of Sony Pictures, target of the 2014 computer hack in revenge for a comedy movie Kim didn’t like.

North Korea announced earlier this month that it was close to test-launching an ICBM. It apparently did so to send a “strategic message” to incoming president-elect Trump. Analysts are divided over how close Pyongyang is to realizing its full nuclear ambitions.

America can’t wait to find out, especially if it is after an attack. It has to dismantle North Korea’s military and nuclear capabilities as soon as possible. Decades of six-party talks have failed to denuclearize North Korea. A new approach is needed.

President Trump wants to recalibrate America’s relationship with China and Russia? The best place to do so is North Korea.

The U.S.-China-Russia partnership’s top priority should be to eliminate North Korea’s weapons proliferation programs – conventional and nuclear. Forget about the U.N. and its’ widely mocked and unenforceable sanctions. Forget about the failed six-party talks or the five working groups aimed at ending North Korea’s nuclear program. Forget about the more useless sanctions. Forget about bipartisan recriminations. Forget about the blame game – especially picking on China. Forget about a nuclear East Asia. The universal opposition and condemnation of North Korea’s nuclear tests – the first in October 2006 and the second in May 2009 – demands an urgent alternative solution to the rehashed and recycled proposals that have been tossed around since the 1953 Korean armistice took effect.

China and Russia, which like America opposed the North Korean tests, have been humiliated and desperately want a solution they can jointly embrace with America. Kim Jong-Il’s nuclear bluff must be called. The Dear Leader crows this year of the rooster that he is ready for war. Bring it on and let’s end the Korean War once and for all. What does America have to lose?

The Korean armistice signed on July 27, 1953, between North Korea and the U.N. forces in Korea led by the U.S. remains in force. No formal peace treaty was ever concluded. People have forgotten that more than 84,000 soldiers from 16 countries serving under the U.N. flag died during the conflict. More than a million Korean civilians also died, as well as an estimated 900,000 Chinese troops fighting with the North Koreans. A peace treaty is long overdue.

Why should China and Russia go along? Because the U.S. should and will agree that Taiwan is a province of China and that America will not defend Taiwan should it declare independence. The U.S. settles two thorny issues simultaneously. China and America have a lot to offer Russia to come along. Especially America.

America, China, Japan, Russia and South Korea must initiate five-party talks without pre-conditions or sanctions, which only hurt and subject the majority of North Koreans to more misery and suffering because of their self-centered sycophant authoritarian leadership. Having said that, there is no reason he can’t get credit for lifting the sanctions and improving his people’s lives.

The five-party talks should explore how best to find an honorable face-saving exit for Kim and Co. This is a negotiating tactic America has perfected with several Haitian dictators over the years – as well as President Marcos of the Philippines – allowing them to live comfortably in exile with their country’s plundered funds. With China on board, Kim has no other choice other than firing his nukes and getting annihilated.

North Korea borders economic powers China, Russia and South Korea, Japan is nearby, across the Sea of Japan. These four economic superpowers can set up cooperative cross-border economic zones on their mutual borders, the kind Kim has visited and admired in China and is hopelessly and helplessly trying to emulate.

These special economic zones would transform Pyongyang’s central planned Stalinist communist economy into neutral economic buffer zones in the potentially explosive area and stop the accelerating destabilization rippling through the region and beyond. It is the only feasible way to bring stability to East Asia and the world.

It is in the world’s long-term strategic interest to neutralize North Korea’s nuclear capability, create a North-South confederation and eventually a unified Korea that enjoys prosperous cooperative economic zones with its neighbors.

Economic prosperity also would prevent a massive North Korea refugee exodus and ensuing crisis that China and Russia are concerned about, especially if American and European corporate citizens embrace the economic zones the same way they did in China. This would allow North Korea to finally sign a peace agreement that would clear the way for gradual reunification with the South. The cost of reunification, unlike the case in postwar Germany, would be shared by the five in the interest of all humanity.

The military concerns of China can also be addressed by not installing the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense System in South Korea and creating a military alliance between the U.S., China, Russia and South Korea to ensure stability in the re-united country.

The five-party effort could transform the secretive and isolated Hermit Kingdom and its crippled economy into an open, vital, sunlit renaissance model for basket cases like Zimbabwe and other failed states.

President Trump can make the world not only great, but peaceful, as well as making America Great and a world leader again.