Behind the North Korean Crisis:
The Drive of U.S. Imperialism

Sep 18, 2017

According to U.S. officials and the news media, the North Korean government is supposedly run by “dangerous mad men,” who are threatening the world with “weapons of mass destruction,” because the North Korean military has carried out several tests of both nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles over the last year.

In fact, the real aggressor, armed to the teeth with a vast arsenal of the most barbaric weapons of mass destruction, is none other than the U.S. government and military itself. For the last 65 years, the U.S. military has threatened North Korea with nuclear annihilation on a regular basis.

During the Korean War (1950-53), the U.S. considered using nuclear weapons seven times. Starting in 1958, the U.S. placed “Honest John” nuclear missiles, atomic cannons, and nuclear cruise missiles on the Korean peninsula.

The U.S. ended this program in 1991, after the fall of the Soviet Union. But that didn’t end the U.S. military and nuclear threats against North Korea. The U.S. has been conducting war games every year on that country’s border, rehearsing invasion, occupation and the assassination of top North Korean officials.

The war games that began this spring involved over 300,000 U.S. and South Korean troops, and included carrier battle group and submarine maneuvers, amphibious landings of mechanized brigades, naval blockade, live fire drills, special forces infiltration, as well as B-1B, B-2 and B-52 nuclear bombing runs.

These war games are no idle threats. During the Korean War, the U.S. military carried out one of the most destructive and vindictive wars in history, exterminating one-quarter of the North Korean population and bombing the country into a moonscape, dropping 50,000 gallons of napalm every single day for over three years!

Many were rightfully horrified by Trump’s recent talk of letting loose “fire and fury” against North Korea. But that is exactly what the U.S. did during the Korean War. And it is exactly what U.S. leaders have threatened ever since. General Colin Powell, for example, twice threatened to turn North Korea into a “charcoal briquette.”

No, the Korean War is not over. And not only because the mighty U.S. super-power aims to continue to punish the country and its people for daring to stand up to U.S. dictates. The U.S. military is using the North Korean crisis, that U.S. imperialism itself provoked, as an excuse and cover for “the Asian pivot,” that is, the U.S. military build-up throughout Asia, a build-up aimed against its big competitors in the region, China and Russia.

And as the U.S. military extends its tentacles ever deeper into one of the world’s fastest growing regions, trying to impose the domination of U.S. imperialism, it is turning the entire world into an increasingly more dangerous powder keg.