After Barack Obama’s eight long years of gutting America’s missile-defense capabilities, our nation has awakened to the nightmare of a North Korea armed with nuclear missiles capable of reaching U.S. territory.
Fortunately, Donald Trump, who, unlike his predecessor, takes his responsibility to defend the nation seriously, now resides in the White House, and Obama, one in a series of Democrat presidents who cleared the way for the nuclear adventurism of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), is on the outside looking in.
“North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States,” President Trump told reporters yesterday after applauding the unanimous weekend approval of the toughest U.N. Security Council sanctions resolution against North Korea to date. “They will be met with fire, fury, and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before.”
Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis issued a statement urging North Korea to back off or suffer the consequences. “The DPRK should cease any consideration of actions that would lead to the end of its regime and the destruction of its people,” he said. “While our State Department is making every effort to resolve this global threat through diplomatic means, it must be noted that the combined allied militaries now possess the most precise, rehearsed, and robust defensive and offensive capabilities on Earth.”
But not all of the blame for the status quo can be assigned to Democrats.
North Korea has long massed troops near the border with South Korea, effectively holding the population of nearby Seoul and other densely-populated areas hostage. The DPRK is thought to have the ability to quickly assault and subdue a large chunk of South Korea, with devastating consequences for the populace. The Korean War itself began June 25, 1950 but never technically ended. Hostilities were suspended when representatives from both countries signed an armistice agreement on July 27, 1953. The “final peaceful settlement” envisioned in the pact never happened. The U.S. was a major party to the armed conflict and it still has troops stationed on the Korean Peninsula.
“I think, basically, since the end of the Korean War, we’ve had a succession of administrations – Republican and Democratic – who have faced a very unhappy reality, Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney told SiriusXM host Raheem Kassam on Wednesday’s “Breitbart News Daily” show.
“And that is the massive, if uneven, shall we say, North Korean military … so closely positioned at the Demilitarized Zone to Seoul, the capital of South Korea, that at will, from a standing start, they could essentially devastate the 24 or so million people who live in and around that capital city.”
Kim Jong-un “greatly accelerated the development and testing programs of all ranges of North Korea’s missile systems,” according to Bruce Klingner, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. “During his five years in power, he has overseen three times as many missile launches as his father did during his eighteen-year reign.”
Kim wouldn’t actually have to incinerate a U.S. population center to inflict devastating damage on the nation. There is some evidence that the North Koreans have the ability to detonate a nuclear weapon on a satellite in orbit over U.S. territory in order to create an EMP, or electromagnetic pulse. An EMP could take the nation’s electric grid offline and fry the circuitry of everything from automobiles to smartphones to toasters.