Military option in NKorea? Bannon says no
BRIDGEWATER, N.J. — Contradicting a boss already under pressure to fire him, President Donald Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon says there’s no military solution to the threat posed by North Korea and its nuclear ambitions. Just last week, Trump pledged to answer North Korean aggression with “fire and fury.”
In an interview with The American Prospect posted online late Wednesday, Bannon told the liberal publication that the U.S. is losing the economic race against China and talks about purging his rivals from the Defense and State departments.
Asked about the whitesupremacist movement, whose march on Charlottesville, Virginia, last weekend led to deadly violence, Bannon dismissed them as “losers,” “a fringe element” and “a collection of clowns.”
A White House spokeswoman said “Bannon’s comments stand on their own.”
In a separate interview with the DailyMail.com, Bannon said his comments to The American Prospect “drew fire away from” Trump and that he successfully “changed the (media) narrative” about Trump.
Bannon’s comments on North Korea, which contradict Trump’s tough approach, could add to pressure on the president to fire him.
“There’s no military solution (to North Korea’s nuclear threats), forget it,” Bannon said. “Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that 10 million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.”
Bannon also outlined his push for the U.S. to adopt a tougher stance on China trade — without waiting to see whether Beijing will help restrain Kim, as Trump has pressed China’s leader to do. Trump also has lamented U.S. trade deficits with China.
“The economic war with China is everything,” Bannon said. “And we have to be maniacally focused on that. If we continue to lose it, we’re five years away, I think, 10 years at the most, of hitting an inflection point from which we’ll never be able to recover.”
A Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, said Thursday that both sides have benefited from trade.
Hua said “there is no winner in a trade war. We hope the relevant people can refrain from dealing with a problem in the 21st century with a zero-sum mentality from the 19th or the 20th century.”
Hua appealed for dialogue to “preserve the sound and steady growth of China-U.S. relations.”
In the interview, Bannon muses about getting rid of administration officials who disagree with his stance on China and North Korea and replacing them with “hawks.”
“We gotta do this. The president’s default position is to do it, but the apparatus is going crazy,” Bannon said.
One official Bannon mentioned by name is Susan Thornton, currently America’s top diplomat for Asia.
On Thursday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson signaled support for his senior adviser. After greeting Japan’s defense chief and top diplomat at the State Department, Tillerson pointedly shook Thornton’s hand in front of the cameras as their meeting began.
Tillerson and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis sought in the meeting to reinforce the threat of possible U.S. military action against North Korea. The secretary of state stressed after the security talks that the U.S. seeks a peaceful solution to the standoff over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, but he said a U.S.-led campaign of economic pressure and diplomacy needs to be backed by potential military consequences.
Mattis said that if North Korea launches a missile toward Japan, the U.S. Pacific island of Guam, the United States or South Korea, “We would take immediate, specific actions to take it down.”
North Korea’s missile launches “must stop immediately,” Tillerson said.