Has Trump still got a Korea in politics?
I HAVE dealt with some interesting US presidents in my half-century in politics.
George W Bush thought he was a cowboy when he actually went to a posh boarding school.
Bill Clinton saw my punch and declared: “He’s my kind of guy!”
But whether it’s fake news or fake tan, no one trumps Donald.
This is a man who goes nuclear and hits the Twitter send button to launch a first strike on anyone who dares to cross his path.
While Bush was far more diplomatic, I see many similarities between him and the Donald.
Both came from privileged backgrounds and rode a right-wing populist wave to defeat more talented but less enigmatic opponents. Bush beat Al Gore, Trump defeated Hillary Clinton.
Both wanted to move away from the international stage and put America First. Bush pulled out of the Kyoto Climate Deal to cut greenhouse gases, Trump did the same with the Paris Accord.
But both found themselves facing intervening on the world stage with unilateral military threats against dictators.
For Bush it was Saddam Hussein in Iraq, for Trump it’s Kim Jong-un and North Korea.
Trump is not known for listening to advice. But as someone who saw at first hand the disastrous fallout from the Iraq War, I hope he reads this.
There’s no doubt, like Saddam, Kim Jong-un desperately wants a weapon of mass destruction.
His successful launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile that could carry nuclear warheads to the US has led to calls for military intervention.
It reminds me of our intelligence claims that Saddam could strike the UK within 45 minutes. We learnt from the Chilcot Report on the Iraq Inquiry, to which I gave evidence, that even the intelligence agencies warned of the inadequacies of their sources.
But these concerns were never referred to in any documents given to the Cabinet I sat in, or in Blair’s sofa government meetings.
There was also a failure to provide the Cabinet with the Attorney General’s written judgment that it was legal to act militarily against Iraq. Moreover it was constantly confirmed that military action taken will not be influenced by regime change.
It was. And it’ll be the same with North Korea.
One year on from his report, and Chilcot says Tony Blair was “not straight with the UK over Iraq”.
Based on my time in the Cabinet during the build-up to war, I know
I may have travelled the seas as a young man. But last week I had the chance to venture into space. Radio Humberside asked its listeners what Hull icon they’d like to see lifted 38,000 metres into the stratosphere tethered to a high-altitude weather balloon. One suggestion was a waving model of me. But the public felt the honour of space travel should go to someone more typical of Hull. So they voted to send up a tray of pattie and chips! what he means. Now I fear the same arguments are being made again to build the case to launch another military attack.
But this time we must listen to Russia and China, the two main dissenting voices cautioning us about going to war against Iraq.
They issued a joint call to North Korea to stop its missile and nuclear programme in exchange for South Korea and the US to hold off on military manoeuvres.
As I highlighted in this column before, I spoke with the Deputy Premier of China who had returned from discussions with North Korea trying to get them to scrap their nuclear weapon programme.
President Trump’s foreign policy on North Korea seems to consist of blaming China on Twitter and getting his ambassador to the UN to ramp up the threat of strikes.
But if Trump can ease sanctions on Pyongyang and meet Kim Jong-un face-to-face, he may yet move from bungling President to skilled Korea politician.