Imperialism Kritik Index
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Link: North Korea( ) The US uses the threat of North Korea’s nuclear weapons to justify continued imperial presence in the Asia-Pacific. Such policies only increase regional tensions, risking all-out war and turning the case.Symonds, 2016 [Peter Symonds, national editor of the World Socialist Website. “US-South Korean militaries rehearse pre-emptive strikes on North Korea.” 8 March 2016. http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/03/08/nkor-m08.html] Last week, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ordered the country’s military to be ready to use its nuclear weapons at any time and declared that it was time “to convert our mode of military counteraction toward the enemies into a pre-emptive attack one.” This belligerent posturing and the efforts to amass a primitive nuclear arsenal are deeply reactionary. By its attempts to shore up popular support by whipping up nationalism and militarism, the faction-riven regime divides North Korean workers from their counterparts in South Korea, Asia and around the world, and plays directly into the hands of US imperialism.¶ Time and again over the past quarter century, Washington has deliberately exacerbated tensions on the Korean Peninsula as a means of putting pressure, not so much on North Korea, but on China. While the Obama administration pays lip service to negotiations over Pyongyang’s nuclear programs, it has ruled out any resumption of the six-party talks led by China unless North Korea makes major concessions in advance.¶ The US is exploiting the current tensions to justify its military build-up in North East Asia, including talks now underway to station a Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) anti-ballistic missile system in South Korea—a key element in the Pentagon’s plans for nuclear war against China and also Russia. Moscow has condemned the “unprecedented” joint military exercises in South Korea for putting pressure on North Korea, as well as Pyongyang’s threatening statements.¶ The Obama administration’s actions on the Korean Peninsula are just one aspect of its “pivot to Asia”—an all-embracing diplomatic, economic and strategic offensive throughout the Indo-Pacific region aimed at subordinating China and ensuring US hegemony. The restructuring of US forces in South Korea is part of a far broader military build-up that envisages 60 percent of American air and naval power being stationed in Asia by 2020 as well as the strengthening of alliance, strategic partnerships and basing arrangements to encircle China.¶ Washington’s decision to wind up tension on the Korean Peninsula is utterly reckless. A minor accident and miscalculation along the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) by either side has the potential to escalate what has always been a dangerous flashpoint into all-out war. Inflammatory rhetoric emanates not only from Pyongyang, but also from the right-wing government in Seoul headed by President Park Geun-hye, daughter of the US-backed dictator Park Chung-hee. The South Korean military yesterday stated: “We will respond resolutely and mercilessly if the North ignores our warning and attempts a provocation.”¶ US State Department spokesman John Kirby responded to the North Korean statement by declaring: “We certainly do take those kinds of threats seriously… and again call on Pyongyang to cease with the provocative rhetoric, to cease with the threats.” Analysts strongly doubt the ability of North Korea to miniaturise its crude nuclear weapons and mount them on a missile. For Washington to say it takes the empty threat seriously raises the question as to what it is planning. Is it preparing a military provocation of its own in line with the aggressive new OPLAN 5015 Link: North KoreaProlif( ) Encouraging North Korea to renounce its nuclear weapons would allow US imperialism to go unchecked.Parenti, 2009 [Michael Parenti is an award-winning author and lecturer. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Yale University. “North Korea: ‘Sanity’ at the Brink.” June 25, 2009. http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2009/parenti250609.html] In his earlier Cairo speech Obama stated, "No single nation should pick and choose which nation holds nuclear weapons." But that is exactly what the United States is trying to do in regard to a benighted North Korea -- and Iran. Physicist and political writer Manuel Garcia, Jr., observes that Washington's policy "is to encourage other nations to abide by the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty -- and renounce nuclear weapons -- while exempting itself." Others must disarm so that Washington may more easily rule over them, Garcia concludes.¶ US leaders still refuse to give any guarantee that they will not try to topple Pyongyang's communist government. There is talk of putting the DPRK back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism, though Secretary Clinton admits that evidence is wanting to support such a designation.¶ From its lonely and precarious perch the North cannot help feeling vulnerable. Consider the intimidating military threat it faces. The DPRK's outdated and ill-equipped army is no match for the conventional forces of the United States, South Korea, and Japan. The United States maintains a large attack base in South Korea. As Paul Sack reminds us in a recent correspondence to the New York Times, at least once a year the US military conducts joint exercises with South Korean forces, practicing a land invasion of the DPRK. The US Air Force maintains a "nuclear umbrella" over South Korea with nuclear arsenals in Okinawa, Guam, and Hawaii. Japan not only says it can produce nuclear bombs within a year, it seems increasingly willing to do so. And the newly installed leadership in South Korea is showing itself to be anything but friendly toward Pyongyang.¶ The DPRK's nuclear arsenal is a two-edged sword. It can deter attack or invite attack. It may cause US officials to think twice before cinching a tighter knot around the North, or it may cause them to move aggressively toward a confrontation that no one really wants.¶ After years of encirclement and repeated rebuffs from Washington, years of threat, isolation, and demonization, the Pyongyang leaders are convinced that the best way to resist superpower attack and domination is by developing a nuclear arsenal. It does not really sound so crazy. As already mentioned, the United States does not invade countries that are armed with long-range nuclear missiles (at least not thus far). ¶ Having been pushed to the brink for so long, the North Koreans are now taking a gamble, upping the ante, pursuing an arguably "sane" deterrence policy in the otherwise insane world configured by an overweening and voracious empire.
Link: North Korea( ) Depictions of North Korea as a threat have no basis in reality…they are simply used to justify imperial actions toward China.Beal, 2008 [Tim Beal, PhD School of Marketing and International Business at Victoria University of Wellington. “State, Globalisation and Imperialism: the case of North Korea.” Paper presented at the 58th Political Studies Association Annual Conference at the University of Swansea, 2 April 2008. https://www.academia.edu/9001709/State_Globalisation_and_Imperialism_the_case_of_North_Korea There are many aspects to American policy towards North Korea. Although overshadowed by the Middle East, it is part of the domestic debate about foreign policy amongst the elite and, in particular at the moment, part of the contest between the presidential candidates. However, it surfaces most strongly in policy towards China. North Korea policy is really a subset of China policy. The basic reason that the United States balks at accepting peaceful coexistence with the DPRK, even at the expense of forgoing the opportunity to extend globalisation, is that a North Korea which can be portrayed as hostile and threatening, even though that has no basis in reality, is an essential component of imperial policy towards rising China. This North Korea provides a justification for Missile Defense.70 This North Korea provides an excuse, and a very popular one, for the remilitarisation of Japan, a remilitarisation aimed at China.71 And it is this North Korea which provides the rationale for the American military presence in South Korea and its control of the ROK military.72 This military is no mean prize. In 2006, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) its military expenditure was $21.9 billion, much smaller than America’s $528.7 billion but close on half of China’s $49.5 billion.73 By contrast, the SIPRI Military Expenditure database gives a figure of 5 billion North Korean won for North Korea in 2005. It declines to give a $ equivalent because of ‘the lack of a credible exchange rate’.74 Using the (South Korean) Bank of Korea estimate of 141 won to the dollar this would come out to a mere $35m.75 This exchange rate is much contested and one recent report implies a rate which would cut the North’s military expenditure in dollar terms byhalf.76 In any case, North Korea’s military expenditure is a small fraction of that of South Korea and tiny compared with that of the US.77 Clearly North Korea, despite frequent stories in the media, poses no real offensive military challenge but it does serve the purpose of potentially giving the United States a very valuable reinforcement against China.78 David Kang, one of America’s leading mainstream Korea specialists, discussing recently the US-ROK relationship in the light of the new conservative government in Seoul, wrote: Evidence suggests that even without the U.S.-ROK military alliance instability and change on the Korean peninsula would be less dramatic than some observers have predicted. The absence of an alliance might under certain circumstances, such as continued progress in the six-party talks, have relatively little impact. Under other circumstances, such as increased tension between the United States and China over regional issues, the absence of the alliance might be more consequential. 79 This is easily decoded. North Korea is not the issue (‘instability and change on the Korean peninsula would be less dramatic than some observers have predicted’), China is, and that is why the ROK alliance is important to the US. And, we might add, if the United States accepts peaceful coexistence with North Korea, if it allows the peaceful economic integration of the two Koreas as exemplified by the Kaesong Industrial Complex, rather than attempting to stifle it, if it lifts sanctions and allows North Korea to engage with the global economy, then the justification for the US-ROK alliance becomes problematic. So here we can see a conflict between the desires of globalisation and the needs of empire, and empire wins. And if US policy towards North Korea changes, it will be for reasons of imperial policy, rather than from the desire of capitalism to expand and take North Korea within the embrace of globalisation. Link: North Korea( ) America’s “policing” attitude toward North Korean nuclear weapons is hypocritical. Proliferation will always be inevitable in a world of US imperialism.Argall, 2014 [Louise Argall is a British writer and activist. “The ‘Responsible Nuclear State’: The United States and the Bomb.” Dec 30, 2014. http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2014/argall301214.html] In light of the revelations that the United States was prepared to use nuclear weapons in the event of war between the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the Republic of Korea, it may be worth revisiting the idea that America represents a "responsible" nuclear power, in opposition to countries like Iran and the DPRK, which supposedly desire or maintain nuclear weapons for more nefarious ends. An examination of the historical record shows that US nuclear policy can be described as anything but level-headed.¶ The United States remains the only nation in history to use nuclear weaponry in warfare, against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, resulting in the deaths of at least 129,000 people. While this has often been justified as "necessary" due to a supposed Japanese aversion to surrender, the actual facts of the matter stand in stark contrast with the accepted historical narrative -- there being strong evidence that Japan was prepared to surrender prior to the nuclear attacks, and that the Soviet entry into the war against Japan and the rapid defeat of the Kwantung Army was much more decisive in the decision to capitulate.¶ Having used nuclear arms previously, America has shown the willingness to use them again in multiple situations since then. A partial listing of such instances was compiled by Michael Parenti in The Sword & The Dollar: Imperialism, Revolution, and the Arms Race (St. Martin's Press, 1989, pp.173-4):¶ Truman threatened the Soviets with the atom bomb when they were slow in withdrawing their troops from Iran immediately after World War II. In 1950, he publicly warned that nuclear weapons were under consideration in the Korean War. In 1953 during the same war, Eisenhower made secret nuclear threats against China and North Korea. In 1954 Secretary of State Dulles actually offered tactical nuclear weapons to the French during their final losing battle in Vietnam, but Paris declined the offer. Johnson considered nuclear weapons in Vietnam in 1968. Nixon contemplated using nuclear bombs against North Vietnam on a number of occasions from 1969 to 1972. In 1973, he also thought of using them when it was feared that the Soviets might intervene in the Middle East. On two other occasions, anticipating aggression by Moscow against the Chinese during a border dispute and possible Soviet intervention in the 1971 India-Pakistan war, Nixon toyed with the nuclear option. The "this-might-mean-world-war threat" was applied by Carter in 1980 and reiterated by Reagan in 1981 in response to what both presidents imagined would be a Soviet thrust into northern Iran and other parts of the Middle East. . . . Not yet mentioned were the two occasions when President Kennedy contemplated using nuclear weapons: during the Berlin Crisis of 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.¶ The Nixon administration in particular took relish in threatening the use of nuclear weapons -- in 1969 they ordered bombers armed with thermonuclear weapons to fly toward Soviet airspace for three days in what was called "Operation Giant Lance." This was reflective of Nixon's "madman theory" – that the Soviets would be more likely to back down over their aid to Vietnam if they believed that Nixon was "mad" enough to risk nuclear war over it. Tapes of Nixon's conversations give little more comfort, with even Kissinger finding his proposals to launch nuclear strikes on North Vietnam as an alternative to bombing dikes to be too extreme. Little wonder that the Soviets did not find much humor in Reagan's infamous "we begin the bombing in 5 minutes" gaffe.¶ America's allies fare little better in terms of responsibility. The United Kingdom, for its part, also considered the prospect of nuclear blackmail against China in the 1960s, when it became apparent that Hong Kong could not be held by conventional means in the event of a war. There were also claims by the Labour Party that a Polaris-armed submarine had been sent to Ascension Island during the Falklands War, ready to launch a nuclear strike on the Argentine city of Cordoba if it proved necessary, though the Ministry of Defence has always denied this.¶ Israel has never confirmed or denied that it maintains nuclear weapons, but it is considered a nuclear weapons state by most observers. Israel has previously come close to taking the "Samson Option," as the use of nuclear weapons is known, when it threatened to use nuclear weapons at the start of the Yom Kippur War when the Israeli military was in retreat. It was hoped that "such a drastic step would force the United States to begin an immediate and massive resupply of the Israeli military," according to Seymour M. Hersh (The Samson Option, Random House, 1991, p.227). Additionally, Israel had its mobile nuclear missile launchers on stand-by during the Gulf War when Iraqi SCUD missile attacks almost led to Israeli intervention (Ibid. p.318), and may also have played a part in helping apartheid South Africa acquire nuclear weapons.¶ Insofar as any nuclear state can be "responsible," it has almost always been socialist states that have aimed to avoid confrontation and move towards nuclear disarmament. The Soviet Union was committed to a "no-first-use" policy, which was only changed in 1993 by its successor state the Russian Federation (which also eventually took control of the Soviet Union's entire nuclear arsenal). No-first-use has also been official policy in China since the 1960s, but repeated attempts to urge the United States to commit to a similar pledge have met with little success. Contrary to popular belief, Soviet interest in disarmament also preceded Gorbachev -- for example, Andropov offered to cut Soviet missile forces in Europe steeply in return for reciprocal US cuts in 1982. This was the same year that the United States cast the sole dissenting vote against a UN General Assembly resolution in favor of a comprehensive test ban treaty (as opposed to 1981 when a resolution calling for a halt to all test nuclear explosions was opposed by the United Kingdom too) (William Blum, Rogue State, Zed Books, 2003, pp.189, 191).¶ If much of the world now expresses distrust for US nuclear policy, it can hardly be a surprise, when the United States and its closest allies have acted like "rogue states." In view of that fact, it is impossible to dismiss the idea that nuclear weapons are perhaps the best insurance against US imperialism, a lesson that was learned the hard way by Libya. Therefore, the hope of a world free of nuclear weapons and proliferation is unlikely to be fulfilled as long as the United States continues to believe it is the "policeman of the world." Directory: wp-content -> uploads -> 2012 2012 -> The Case Against the nypd’s Quota-Driven ‘Broken Windows’ Policing What Is It? 2012 -> Aa and na members Dying from Tobacco 2012 -> [Baby Crying] 01: 04 [Ching 2012 -> Unit Name / Nom de l’unité uic / ciu dates 2012 -> What We Owe Jehovah’s Witnesses 2012 -> Oceans Challenge Badge 2012 -> Canadian cycling olympians 2012 -> Greg landry, june olkowski and tom lysiak 2012 -> William goldman 2012 -> Does translocation and restocking confer any benefit to the European eel population? A review Download 258.11 Kb. Share with your friends:
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