Ross Clark
than having no treaty at all, because it signals to the world that UN sanctions are not to be taken seriously.
Contrary to what some critics try to make out Donald Trump is no trigger-fingered megalomaniac. His instinct is to reduce US military intervention. Only a year ago he was being attacked for threatening to close US bases in South Korea and Japan unless those respective countries paid the full cost of hosting US forces.
It would be far better for the world – as Trump himself has intimated – if China were to take a lead in facing up to North Korea’s military aggression. Yet China has always been reluctant to do so, possibly because it feels more comfortable having a communist dictatorship on its doorstep than a USleaning South Korea.
Yet turning a blind eye to Kim Jong-un and his military menace is a foolish policy for China to pursue. While North Korea’s aggression might at present be concentrated on its southern neighbour it won’t be long before China under threat.
The first action should be to remind North Korea that nuclear aggression will be responded to in kind. It was the threat of catastrophic retaliation which kept the peace during the Cold War when in earlier times the stand-off between the Soviet Union and the West would very likely have erupted into warfare.
If North Korea continues to develop and test nuclear weapons it should become the unashamed policy of the rest of the world to destroy the country’s economy.
Some might wonder just how you manage to boycott a hermit state which chooses to isolate itself from the rest of the world. Yet North Korea is not quite as self-reliant as many might imagine. Despite efforts to drill for oil it still has no identifiable reserves. Instead, it relies on imports from Russia and China. They should be cut off, depriving North Korea’s armed forces – which some estimate as the 25th most powerful itself feels in the world – of the juice required to put planes in the air and ships to sea.
If all else fails there is the option of raids on military sites. No one should want this as it would inevitably cause casualties and invite North Korea to respond by launching strikes on South Korea.
But does anyone want to wait until North Korea is able to back its aggression with the ability to launch nuclear air raids on its southern neighbour? In the longer term, eliminating nuclear infrastructure might prove to be the leastdestructive option.
NORTH Korea’s malignancy is there to be seen in the way it treats its own people. While Kim Jong-un fires off missiles into the sea ordinary people struggle to fill their larders or even leave their homes: most people in Pyongyang live in high-rise blocks where the lifts only work intermittently.
Kim Jong-un’s execution of his own brother, Kim Jongnam, at Kuala Lumpur airport in February is a reminder of how a real despot behaves.
Like him or loathe him, Donald Trump is a democratic leader bound by the laws of his country.
Whatever else you might think of his policies and his language, his policy of ending international appeasement of North Korea’s nuclear ambitions deserves our support.
‘Cannot be allowed to build nuclear weapons’