A scheduled surprise visit by President Donald Trump to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between
North and South Korea had to be canceled on Wednesday due to bad weather just hours before
Trump was set to address South Korea's National Assembly.
The early morning helicopter trip to the border zone between North and South Korea was called
off due to extremely heavy fog which resulted in poor visual conditions.
South Korea's President Moon Jae In had been planning to join Trump in the DMZ.
White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said this visit would have marked the first
time both the presidents of the two nations would have visited the area together.
Trump is slated wrap up his two-day visit to Seoul with an assembly speech before heading
to Beijing as he seeks to gain international support to isolate North Korea even further.
Vice President Mike Pence visited the area back in April.
Check out what the America-hating socialists over at Common Dreams have to say about President
Trump's actions regarding North Korea:
After Surprise Visit to DMZ, Pence Tells North Korea 'All Options Are on the Table'
Critics condemn Trump administration's "unhinged foreign policy"
Seemingly unabashed after North Korea's warning last week of an imminent "thermonuclear
war," Vice President Mike Pence once again engaged in saber-rattling against the country
on a surprise visit to the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea on Monday.
"[W]e have plenty of reason to be frightened of Donald Trump's 'America First' foreign
policy, which doesn't serve Americans, much less anyone else around the world."
—Christine Hong, University of California Santa Cruz"All options are on the table"
when it comes to North Korea, Pence said as he stood alongside South Korea's acting
President Hwang Kyo-ahn, in Seoul, and promised "an overwhelming and effective response"
if North Korea launched a nuclear weapon.
"Just in the past two weeks we witnessed the strength of resolve of our new leader.
North Korea would do well not to test his resolve," Pence added, referring to President
Donald Trump's unilateral deployment of 59 cruise missiles to Syria and the U.S. military's
use of its largest non-nuclear bomb in Afghanistan.
Pence began a multi-country Asia tour with his planned visit to Seoul on Sunday, and
surprised observers by also visiting the DMZ on Monday.
Earlier Monday, when Pence spoke from the DMZ, the vice president vowed that the Obama
administration's "era of strategic patience is over."
While he spoke, North Korean soldiers stood mere feet away on the other side of the border,
and snapped photos of the vice president.
"President Trump has made it clear that the patience of the United States and our
allies in this region has run out and we want to see change," Pence said.
"We want to see North Korea abandon its reckless path of the development of nuclear
weapons, and also its continual use and testing of ballistic missiles is unacceptable,"
he continued.
Foreign policy and North Korea experts were highly critical of the vice president's
comments.
"I think what we're witness to is a kind of revisionism both with Vice President Prence
and Secretary of State [Rex] Tillerson.
They've made comments that [former president Barack] Obama's policy of strategic patience
is a thing of the past, and I think that that fundamentally misconstrues what the nature
of strategic patience was," said Christine Hong, a professor at the University of California
at Santa Cruz, on Democracy Now!
Monday.
"Far from being a kinder, gentler, or even softer policy toward North Korea, Obama's
policy toward North Korea was in point of fact one of warfare," Hong said, pointing
out the Obama administration's cyberwarfare campaign against the North Korean regime.
"Even the possibility of military action against North Korea […] would be inconceivable
if the Obama administration hadn't made the militarization of the larger Asia Pacific
region one of its topmost foreign policy objectives."
"The fact is that American nuclear intimidation of North Korea goes back to the Korean War,"
added Bruce Cumings, author of North Korea: Another Country, who also spoke on Democracy
Now!
Monday.
"After the Korean War in 1958 we installed hundreds of nuclear weapons in the south,
[we were] the first country to bring nuclear weapons to the peninsula," Cumings noted,
adding that "President Obama threatened North Korea with nuclear weapons many times,
by flying B-2 bombers over the South, dumping dummy bombs on islands, and so on.
It's natural that North Korea would seek a deterrent."
Hong further pointed out:
The U.S. performs the largest war games in the world with its South Korean ally, twice
annually.
And in the course of performing these military exercises it actually rehearses a number of
things.
It rehearses a decapitation of the North Korean leadership, the invasion and occupation of
North Korea, and it also performs a nuclear first strike against North Korea with dummy
munitions.
And so we have as one of the possibilities a preemptive nuclear strike against North
Korea.
That is the nature of the unhinged foreign policy that we're seeing on the part of
the Trump administration.
Even though North Korea and Kim Jong-Un serves as a convenient foil, a kind of bad guy, for
U.S. foreign policy within the larger Asia Pacific region, we have plenty of reason to
be frightened of Donald Trump's "America First" foreign policy, which doesn't serve
Americans, much less anyone else around the world.
"What's so terrible about [the United States' pre-emptive strike threat] is that
you essentially get a stand off, with North Korea having nuclear weapons, the U.S. having
nuclear weapons, but the North Korea not being able to use them anywhere without being turned
into a charcoal briquette," Cumings observed.
"That was General Colin Powell's reference to what would happen if North Korea launched
a nuclear weapon in anger."
Urging diplomacy instead of military action, Cumings continued:
I think the U.S. has quite purposefully ratcheted up the tension[…]
I don't think Vice President Pence is right that what President Trump has done has showed
strength and resolve.
It's one of the easiest things to fling 59 cruise missiles into Syria; apparently
the military has wanted to test this MOAB, "mother of all bombs," for some time,
and they went ahead and did it.
It's not clear what the outcome of either strike is.
It seems that Mr. Trump, who ran on an anti-interventionist platform, is actually enjoying the toys that
the military can provide to him, and perhaps using them in Korea, which would be a complete
disaster.
Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also urged
diplomacy on Monday, arguing that there is no military solution to the tensions on the
Korean peninsula.
In addition, Hong went on to argue that "we should all be mystified that successive U.S.
presidents have tried to outsource their foreign policy in the Asia Pacific to China, as if
they hold the same interests in the Asia Pacific region," and speculated that the "real
target" of Trump's saber-rattling in the Korean peninsula is not North Korea, but China.
"Every single amplified and ratcheted up war game was justified in the name of a dangerous
and unpredictable North Korea, but China understood full well what was happening, which was the
encirclement of China," Hong said.
"So North Korea has served as a very convenient ideological ruse for the United State's
military industrial complex, but the real target is China."
Sounds like those America-haters would rather have us nuked.
It is known that North Korea is currently working on an advanced version of its existing
KN-20 intercontinental ballistic missile that could potentially reach the west coast of
the United States.
This news comes less than six months after it launched its first ICBM.
Sadly three decades of appeasing the murdering dictator of North Korea has brought us to
this.
And this time I very much doubt a signed Michael Jordan basketball, as former president Bill
Clinton would send, will be enough to stop this whack job Fat Boy Kim Jong Un's current
temper tantrum.
This time we will have to face him head-on.
No more appeasing terrorists out of convenience, or because public opinion is influenced by
the leftists who sympathize with Kim Jong Un.
The more we appease scumbags like Fat Boy the more powerful they become.
It's time to take him out once and for all.
Before he has the ability to effectively counter attack.
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