THERE’S been a stunned silence from world leaders at Donald Trump’s reckless military build-up in south east Asia. Politicians seem to be lost for words. I can’t think of anything intelligible that Jeremy Corbyn or Labour has said about the current crisis. The normally voluble Tony Blair has been struck dumb. European leaders like Angela Merkel have been keeping their own counsel. Even Nicola Sturgeon seems speechless.
This is understandable. They’ve been taken off guard by Donald Trump’s blitzkrieg on the world’s military flashpoints. Hardly had we come to terms with his bombing raid on Bashir Assad’s Syria – America’s first direct military intervention there – than he dropped the Mother of All Bombs on Afghanistan. “That’s what freedom looks like,” said Fox News
Then we learned of the suspected US cyber attack on North Korea’s military infrastructure that may have aborted a missile test there. Clearly, Russia isn’t the only country heavily engaged in cyber warfare. An American “armada” has been assembled just off the North Korean coast and President Trump is making clear that any nuclear test by the Korean dictator Kim Jong Un will be met with a lethal non-nuclear response.
With these two cartoon leaders squaring up like this it may be hard to take the confrontation seriously. But this is how wars begin. Indeed, we’re closer now to nuclear conflict than at any time since the Second World War. And that isn’t the view of some lefty columnist , but the words of Admiral Lord West, the First Sea Lord, and veteran of the Falklands War. “There is a real concern,” he warned at the weekend, “that by miscalculation someone will do something stupid”.
Kim is of course a monster, and the world would be best rid of him, but this isn’t the way. The Cold War showed that only the citizens living under such dictatorships can legitimately overthrow them. Threatening North Korea with a pre-emptive strike is following the Kim script. He can now say that the country really is being threatened by a warlike American government that is throwing its weight around in defiance of international law and posing a clear and present danger to the security of North Korea.
Does international law apply to a delinquent country that keeps its impoverished population in a nationwide concentration camp? Yes it does. We may detest the North Korean regime, but the first principle of international law is that counties do not launch military strikes against countries that pose no immediate threat. North Korea’s nuclear weapons pose a theoretical threat to the US, but this cannot reasonably be claimed to be an immediate one. A number of countries, including Israel, have nuclear weapons programmes in defiance of nuclear non-proliferation protocols.
Kim is prepared to use nuclear weapons, and reckless American military action endangers the lives of millions of people, not just the South Koreans. War on the Korean peninsula could ignite a much wider conflagration involving China, Japan and Russia. There is a network of alliances in south east Asia and a series of contentious issues, like China’s build-up in the South China Sea and the ongoing dispute over Taiwan, that could easily blow up in the wake of a first strike on North Korea. Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, has warned America to observe international law.
President Trump lacks any sense of history or any understanding of international law or geo-political instability. He seems to be easily swayed by those who have his ear, and the US military has always had a direct line to the Oval Office. He has discovered, as have many political leaders facing intractable issues at home, that military adventures abroad solve problems.
This makes him a dangerous figure. It’s time for the world to wake up and curb Mr Trump’s enthusiasm for confrontation. He’s on a hair trigger. No one forecast where the assassination of an obscure Archduke would lead the world in 1914.
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