North Korea's official mouthpiece, the Korean Central News Agency, issued a blistering message
on President Obama's eight years in power ahead of the U.S. election, denouncing the White House's
policies in East Asia. The KCNA article — a “white paper” titled “US
collapse is its fate in history” — mocked the Obama administration's
“pivot to Asia” and criticized its plans to counter nuclear
proliferation.
KCNA, which has referred to the U.S. president as a “wicked black monkey” in the past and described Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton's appearance
as that of a “pensioner going shopping,” declared over the weekend that
the United States is home to a “completely failed regime” that “will
certainly be buried.”
Its white paper purported to summarize the
failings of U.S. policy — or “imperialist moves” — during Obama's
tenure. It called out U.S. efforts to halt North Korea's nuclear
program, saying they have been consigned to the “cesspool of history”
and reflect only Washington's “ambition for nuclear monopoly.”
It
offered some characteristic (and delusional) tough talk: “The Obama
administration's hostile policy toward the DPRK [North Korea] and its
strategy for dominating Asia are going totally bankrupt [through] the
toughest counteraction of Songun Korea to terminate the empire of evil,”
KCNA said, referring to Pyongyang's formal state ideology.
North
Korea has spent years developing its covert nuclear program, much to
the alarm and ire of the United States and its Asian allies. The specter
of the pariah state's nukes has hung over the election campaign, with
Republican Donald Trump suggesting earlier that he would welcome other
friendly countries in the region perhaps obtaining their own atomic
weapons — something that flies in the face of decades of Washington
policy.
Nuclear proliferation experts who watch North Korea believe the regime is refining its strategic thinking
around when it could deploy its nuclear arsenal, moving away from
simple Cold War-era deterrence to actually considering using tactical
nukes in conventional warfare.
“It
looks like North Korea is thinking about what it would look like if
they had to use these weapons on their own,” Vipin Narang, a political
scientist at MIT, told my colleague Anna Fifield last month. “This program is no longer a joke.”
Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of the Atlantic, this week published a doomsday assessment of how a potential nuclear escalation by Pyongyang could spell disaster under a Trump presidency:
No
country in recent years has consistently thwarted the national security
objectives of U.S. presidents in the way that North Korea has. Bill
Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and their top advisers and
negotiators have tried, and failed, to curtail North Korea’s nuclear
ambitions. Their failures, though, were of the manageable sort: So far,
at least, a misstep by an American president has not led to a nuclear
exchange on — or beyond — the Korean peninsula.
Goldberg
adds: “There is nothing in Donald Trump’s record to suggest that he has
the self-possession, discipline, analytical sophistication, and
capacity to assimilate new information that would allow him to cope with
a North Korea-sized challenge.”
Source: WP
