Page 12
June 27, 2018
O PINION
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America and Korea are Part of the Same Threat
Trump, Kim
and the nuclear
status quo
b y
r obert C. k oehler
I get the skepticism
regarding the tentative
nuclear disarmament
agreement the president
and Kim Jong-un reached two
weeks ago, but not the cynicism
— not the outright dismissal.
It’s too easy to hate Trump, but
he isn’t the point. In his reckless
unpredictability — in his lust for
applause and desperation to steal
headlines from the Robert Muel-
ler investigation — he snatched
an opportunity to meet with the
leader of North Korea . . . “Little
Rocket Man” . . . and talk about
reducing the danger of nuclear
war. Say what?
It hardly seems possible — but
maybe Trump has a mission far
beyond anything he himself en-
visions: visiting creative destruc-
tion, you might say, on the plan-
et’s geopolitical infrastructure,
loosening the certainties of na-
tionalism and armed self-defense.
Perhaps the salvation of Planet
Earth begins with cluelessness
and ego: a superpower leader who
has no idea what he’s doing.
“It is unclear if President Trump
knew the full implications of ac-
cepting a meeting with Kim or the
fact that a direct meeting with the
leader of the United States was a
prize three generations in the mak-
ing,” Alexandra Bell, senior poli-
cy director at the Center for Arms
Control and Non-Proliferation,
wrote recently in the Bulletin of
Atomic Scientists newsletter.
“It is also unclear if Presi-
dent Trump had a grand de-
sign for a nuclear agreement
with North Korea in mind all
along, or if he was equally
willing to go to war.
“Regardless of the underlying
impetus, the president has shown
he is not encumbered by the for-
eign policy status quo or it would
seem, congressional oversight.
Because of his unprecedented
actions — coupled with a few es-
sential variables, including Kim’s
confidence in his nuclear deterrent
and South Korean President Moon
Jae-in’s commitment to diploma-
cy — there is now an opportunity
to forge a real and lasting nuclear
agreement.”
What happens next won’t be
simple. It will take long-term
negotiating skill along with ex-
traordinary honesty, goodwill and
public awareness — indeed, pub-
lic demand, public prayer — that
transcends the limits of geopoliti-
cal expertise . . . “the foreign pol-
icy status quo” that assumes the
necessity of war and regards peace
as an impossibility except as it is
enforced by Western dominance.
Julian Borger, for instance,
reflects the status quo animosity
toward the Trump-Kim accord in
a recent piece in The Guardian.
“Many arms control advocates,”
he writes, “. . . argue that negoti-
ations with North Korea that are
not directly aimed at the speedy
dismantling of its rogue nuclear
weapons programme would give
it legitimacy and send the wrong
message to other regimes contem-
plating whether to build their own
bomb.”
Subtle certainties of Western
dominance resonate in this sen-
tence. These are “regimes” we’re
dealing with here, not actual gov-
ernments. And oh my, we need a
speedy dismantling of North Ko-
rea’s “rogue nuclear weapons”
program.
I hadn’t been aware that there
was an official distinction be-
tween approved nukes and rene-
gade nukes and somehow doubt
that the Marshall Islanders or
Americans who live near the Ne-
vada Test Site — not to mention
the hibakusha of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki — take comfort in the
fact that their radiation-induced
cancer, their shattered lives, their
lost loved ones were the result of
legitimate nuclear testing and use.
The statement also implies that
North Korea developed its nuclear
weapons program — no small feat
for a tiny, impoverished country
— out of sheer orneriness and evil
(unlike us), and Trump’s confer-
ring legitimacy on it through give-
and-take negotiations will only
encourage other evil regimes to go
nuclear.
There seems to be a huge me-
dia memory void surrounding
North Korea — and the U.S. role
in shaping its defense strategy. In
2002, notes Reese Erlich at Com-
mon Dreams, George W. Bush
“declared North Korea to be part
of the ‘Axis of Evil,’ which also
included Iran and Saddam Hus-
sein’s Iraq. After the U.S. invasion
of Iraq in 2003, Korea feared it
could be the next target for regime
change. The DPRK withdrew
from the Non-Proliferation Treaty
and began a sprint towards devel-
oping a nuclear weapon.”
But the memory void goes half
a century deeper than that: back to
the Korean War, when the United
States dropped 635,000 tons of
explosives on North Korea, in-
cluding 32,557 tons of napalm,
destroying cities, farmland and
hydroelectric dams, and killed as
many as 3 million people. Even
more might have died if Gen.
Douglas MacArthur had gotten
his way and the U.S. had used nu-
clear weapons.
The nuclear threat didn’t end
with the armistice in 1953. By
1958, President Eisenhower had
begun shipping atomic weapons
to South Korea and by the mid-
’60s “the United States had more
than 900 nuclear artillery shells,
tactical bombs, surface-to-surface
rockets and missiles, antiaircraft
missiles and nuclear land mines in
South Korea,” according to Walter
Pincus, writing in the New York
Times. The nukes stayed in South
Korea till 1991; their threat un-
derstandably shaped the country’s
strategic thinking.
This is not a defense of North
Korea, just an expansion of the
context in which we evaluate the
current situation. Over seven de-
cades of murderous contempt for
this tiny, communist country, we
helped create it.
In terms of world peace, both
countries are part of the same
threat. Indeed, the U.S. Congress
just approved a new defense bud-
get: $716 billion for the Pentagon,
up $80 billion from last year, and
an additional $21.6 billion for
nuclear weapons programs. This
includes, according to the recent
Nuclear Posture Review, the de-
velopment of “flexible” — low-
yield, usable — nuclear weapons.
Military thinking controls the
United States, just as it does North
Korea. Both countries have rogue
nuclear weapons programs. Real
peace negotiations would include
members of the global public who
want to transcend any possibility
of nuclear war and would have the
courage to bring up Article VI of
the Treaty on the Non-Prolifera-
tion of Nuclear Weapons, which
the United States signed in 1970:
“Each of the Parties to the
Treaty undertakes to pursue nego-
tiations in good faith on effective
measures relating to cessation of
the nuclear arms race at an ear-
ly date and to nuclear disarma-
ment, and on a treaty on general
and complete disarmament under
strict and effective international
control.”
Robert Koehler, syndicat-
ed by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago
award-winning journalist and ed-
itor.
Has Slavery Really Ended or Just Transformed?
The racial
disparities are
stark
J essiCah p ierre
During the week of
June 19, cities around
the country mark June-
teenth — the oldest
known
celebration
commemorating the end of slav-
ery in the United States.
Dating back to 1865, two and a
half years after President Lincoln
signed the Emancipation Proc-
lamation, this holiday marks the
day when Union soldiers landed
at Galveston, Texas with news
that the Civil War had ended and
the enslaved were now free. They
were the last people freed from
slavery after the war.
In much of the country, howev-
by
er, mass incarceration has picked
up where slavery left off.
Over 150 years after the first
Juneteenth, the United States in-
carcerates more of its citi-
zens than any other nation in
the world — over 2.2 million
people, a 500 percent in-
crease over the last 40 years.
This increase didn’t come
from rising crime, but rath-
er from changes in law and
policy dating back to President
Nixon, which led to a dramatic
increase in the number of people
punished with prison time.
African Americans are incar-
cerated at many times the rate of
their white counterparts, leading
law professor Michelle Alexander
— author of The New Jim Crow
— to argue that racial discrimina-
tion has transformed mass incar-
ceration into modern-day slavery.
Like slavery before it, the pris-
on industrial complex is now an
economy unto itself. As the num-
ber of incarcerations has soared,
prison industrialists seized the op-
portunity to capitalize and started
bidding for the right to incarcerate
Americans and otherwise cash in.
The racial disparities are stark,
particularly when it comes to the
drug war. Despite the fact that Af-
rican Americans and whites use
drugs at similar rates, the impris-
onment rate of African Americans
for drug charges is almost 6 times
that of whites. Prison Policy Ini-
tiative data confirms that nonvio-
lent drug convictions are a defin-
ing characteristic of the federal
prison system. Even nonviolent
drug charges give people criminal
records, reducing their employ-
ment prospects and increasing the
likelihood of longer sentences for
any future offenses.
This has impacts across gener-
ations. A recent report by the Eco-
nomic Policy Institute found that
by the age of 14, approximately 25
percent of African American chil-
dren have experienced a parent —
in most cases a father — being im-
prisoned for some period of time.
The “evidence is overwhelm-
ing that the unjustified incarcera-
tion of African American fathers
(and, increasingly, mothers as
well) is an important cause of the
lowered performance of their chil-
dren,“ the report concludes. For
example, children of incarcerated
parents are more likely to misbe-
have at or even drop out of school,
develop learning disabilities, and
to suffer from migraines, asthma,
high cholesterol, depression, anxi-
ety, post-traumatic stress disorder,
and homelessness.
Juneteenth represents a mile-
stone for America, but it’s time to
take the next step: criminal justice
reform to stop the growth of mass
incarceration. Some states have
begun to take matters into their
own hands, implementing import-
ant policies to reduce the number
of people in prison. But federal
action is necessary to propel long-
term systemic change.
Last month the House passed
the First Step Act aimed at reform-
ing our prison and jail system.
Unfortunately, House members
are divided over the provisions of
this bill, and key Senate members
have criticized the bill for not in-
cluding sentencing reform.
In the spirit of Juneteenth, we
need sweeping criminal justice re-
forms so that we can reduce mass
incarceration and improve the
lives of all Americans.
Jessicah Pierre is the inequali-
ty media specialist at the Institute
for Policy Studies. Distributed by
OtherWords.org.