Korea needs peace

Trump’s bluster and brimstone risks a cataclysmic nuclear exchange in Asia.

In the Carribbean Sea, Hurricane Irma is so powerful that its registering on seismographs used to detect earthquakes.

Across the Pacific Ocean, however, seismographs have picked up evidence of another ominous force of destruction — a nuclear bomb.

North Korea, a sad sack of a country by almost every measure, periodically does something outrageous that grabs the world’s attention and elicits what it may desire most — an angry response from the United States. The Trump administration has obliged in spades after the impoverished totalitarian nation conducted a series of missile test firings and followed with its largest nuclear test yet, all of which rattled South Korea, Japan and the U.S., the latter now considered in range of North Korean missiles.

President Donald Trump, mistakenly thinking as he often does that tough talk is good policy, threatened “fire and fury like the world has never seen” against North Korea and, absurdly in our opinion, discouraged South Korean President Moon Jae-in from pursuing peace talks with the North.

He tweeted that South Korea’s talk of “appeasement” with North Korea wouldn’t work because ”they only understand one thing!”

The president has also threatened to withdraw from the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement, which would be bad news for the Port of Houston (South Korea is our sixth largest trading partner) and is brazenly awful diplomacy. Now is the time to rally around an ally, not throw them under the bus. Fortunately, Moon is ignoring Trump.

All attempts at ending these hostilities without conflict are worth pursuing — unless, of course, you’re aching for a fight that ends in nuclear fallout.

On Monday, in an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley continued the ridiculous rhetoric by saying that North Korea was “begging for war.”

Apart from scaring his neighbors and rattling Washington’s cage, theories abound about what North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is hoping to accomplish with his bellicose actions.

Speculation ranges from signaling that an attack on his country will have violent consequences to showing the U.S. that its defense of South Korea, where it has 28,500 troops, is futile.

Possibly the best explanation came from Russian President Vladimir Putin who said Kim wants to maintain power and is developing nuclear weapons because he fears ending up like Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, driven from power by an American-led invasion and hanged by his enemies.

We’d like to see China taking a more active role in controlling Kim’s dangerous impulses, which one would think it could do given that it is North Korea’s top trading partner by far and provides 80 percent of the country’s oil.

So far Chinese leaders have called for talks and indicated possible support for more sanctions but are unlikely to back what the U.S. is now calling for — a ban on oil exports to the rogue country.

We believe there are other steps to be taken before such a drastic measure should be considered, in part because of the dangers an armed and desperate Kim could present.

We support Moon’s efforts to renew peace talks with the North accompanied by a gradual stepping up of international sanctions against North Korea if necessary, deeper Chinese involvement in bringing Kim to heel and less bombast from Trump, who sometimes sounds like he’s the one “begging for war.”

We hope he’s not because there’s no need for a war. With smart international diplomacy this situation can and should be resolved peacefully, and we urge all parties involved to work exclusively toward that goal.

We’d like to see China taking a more active role in controlling Kim’s dangerous impulse.