Strategic patience never more necessary on Korean Peninsula
- By Earl Bousquet
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E-mail China.org.cn, May 5, 2017
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U.S. State Secretary Rex Tillerson delivers a speech to State Department employees in Washington D.C., capital of the United States, May 3, 2017. U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said on Wednesday the United States was preparing new sanctions against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) if Pyongyang takes steps that warrant new sanctions. [Xinhua/Bao Dandan] |
China, like the rest of the world, remains concerned about rising tensions on the Korean Peninsula. Washington insists that its policy of "strategic patience" is now exhausted and it's now ready to go even as far as nuclear war against the DPRK, although there's a lot of ambiguity coming out of Washington.
With the longest-lasting annual military exercises continuing as a possible dress rehearsal for something drastic, an American aircraft carrier group placed within firing range of Pyongyang, the "operationalization" of the dangerous U.S. THAAD missile system in Seoul, U.S. B-1 bombers from Guam flying "test drills" with Korean fighter jets, and Pyongyang's repeated reminders it can launch a pre-emptive missile strike against American targets, alarm bells are sounding in not only South Korea and Japan, but also as far away as Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand.
For more than mere geopolitical reasons, China has every reason to be concerned about the escalation of military tensions so close to home.
Beijing has repeatedly warned - the latest being by Foreign Minister Wang Yi at the United Nations Security Council in late April - that there will be no winners from another Korean war.
All the warnings are clearly being ignored, even as South Koreans themselves are protesting against the deployment of the missile system which the U.S. says is supposed to protect them.
Washington and its allies on the U.N. Security Council are unfairly leaning on Beijing to pressure Pyongyang, without any similar calls on the U.S. to also curb its own war actions in the area.
China has voluntarily imposed sanctions against both the DPRK and ROK, while trying hard to convince reluctant war hawks on all sides that only a peaceful solution will work in a crisis involving nations that fought a devastating war over six decades ago, eventually agreeing to ceasefire but never signing a peace treaty.
Amid the current hysteria, memories are being revived of the 1964 "Gulf of Tonkin" incident in Vietnam - when President Johnson used it to mislead Congress and deepen American involvement in the Vietnam War. Decades later, the search for "weapons of mass destruction" that never existed also led to the devastating Iraq war.
Any such "mistake" in the Korean Peninsula today can lead to yet another catastrophic conflagration that could not only destroy Seoul, Pyongyang and Tokyo, but also involve other regional armies, navies and air forces - and their international backers.
The only country that has ever used nuclear bombs in history again today has its finger hovering over the button, and likewise the only other nation is ever-ready to defiantly test its own armed nuclear capability. But the human and materials costs of any nuclear war today will far outweigh anything we saw at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The DPRK continues the irrational ratcheting-up its defiant rhetoric; likewise the war hawks in Washington. Intensification of overall bellicose language and confrontational actions by both sides are worse than ever.
President Trump's warm proclamations about China and the global optimism since his Mar-a-Lago summit with President Xi Jinping are often cooled and clouded by his contrary and contradictory words and tweets. But by his own admission, Beijing and Washington have a way to create avenues and mechanisms to reduce and eliminate differences, build bridges and heal wounds.
China maintains that efforts towards non-proliferation and promotion of dual-track settlement talks must be strengthened to bring the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue to a peaceful settlement.
While U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson continued to wave the American war flags at North Korea, President Trump has said he is not averse to talking to his DPRK counterpart in the right circumstances. Here again, he is sending mixed signals some of which one can only hope are sincere.
The possibilities of another war between the North and South are more real now than ever before. But the world has repeatedly learned that war never results in true peace. Therefore, if a clear strategy of patience was ever necessary in and around the Korean Peninsula, it's now.
Earl Bousquet is a contributor to china.org.cn, editor-at-large of The Diplomatic Courier and author of an online regional newspaper column entitled Chronicles of a Chronic Caribbean Chronicler.
For more information please visit:http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/earlbousquet.htm
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