Our schoolboy-earnest national security advisor — H. R. McMaster's — lack of proportionate strategic sense

20 December 2017

In Lunacy's Happy Trumpian Reign — some especially insane comments slip by

Consider these recent statements from national security advisor, H. R. McMaster. The former three star Army general said that:

We have to be prepared, if necessary, to compel the denuclearization of North Korea, without the cooperation of that regime.

North Korea is a great threat to all civilized people across the globe.

Why McMaster's earnest statement reeks

In just two sentences, McMaster managed to justify nuclear war based on a gross exaggeration of an easily containable threat. In the background, lies former President George W. Bush's strategically and morally dangerous precedent justifying preemptive war.

(Contemplate where the last one of those got us.)

Realistically speaking, North Korea is economically ineffectual and militarily fenced in. It poses a substantive threat only to South Korea and Japan. And even then, at the cost of guaranteed self-extermination.

The idea that the People's Republic is going to nuke-enable itself into forced prominence on a global scale is just as foolish as the same comment would be, if applied to nuclear-armed Pakistan.

Indeed, Pakistan has caused the United States more trouble in Afghanistan (via its support of the Taliban, insurgents and alleged terrorists) than the PRK has in South Korea, or anywhere else.

The admittedly loathsome North Korean regime's crazy-sounding belligerence is primarily due to its fear of a repeat of the thrashing of its citizenry that the U.S. (debatably illegally) doled out during the Korean War.

PRK leadership is operating on logically reasonable interpretations of non-nuke-holding regime downfalls in Iraq and Libya. Rational strategists, unlike McMaster, recognize that the North Koreans see their nuke and missile program as a way to achieve more dependable security.

In just a few seconds during his BBC interview, McMaster ignored history, mangled sensible strategy, and worsened the North Korean belligerence that he is purportedly concerned about.

The man is either abject fool or talented Machiavellian war promoter.

The moral? — There is no devil so effective as an apparently wholesome one

Preemptively start a nuclear war to dispossess North Korea of its already long-possessed nukes?

Do we think that China and Russia are going to sit still for that?

With "strategists" like McMaster in charge of American policy, the reputedly deluded evangelicals — who keep predicting Armageddon (always arriving just next week) — could be right.

PeteFree.com

Our schoolboy-earnest national security advisor — H. R. McMaster's — lack of proportionate strategic sense