Trump has no intentions of going to war with North Korea: Scholar

Despite war-mongering rhetoric emanating from the Pentagon, US President Donald “Trump has no intentions of going to war with North Korea,” says Dennis Etler, an American political analyst who has a decades-long interest in international affairs.

Trump has said that the United States will deal with North Korea “very successfully” after Pyongyang’s warning of a “Christmas gift.”

North Korea has promised a possible "Christmas surprise" missile test if the US does not come to the negotiating table, noting it would not give in to Washington’s pressure since it already has “nothing to lose.”

Pyongyang said the US was dragging out denuclearization negotiations ahead of Trump’s re-election bid next year, noting it was “entirely up to the US what Christmas gift it will select to get.”

While US military commanders believe the North’s response could involve the testing of a long-range missile, Trump brushed off the warning, saying maybe the surprise is a “nice present.”

“We’ll find out what the surprise is and we’ll deal with it very successfully,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Tuesday. “We’ll see what happens.”

‘We’ll deal with it,’ Trump brushes off N Korea warning of 'Christmas gift'

President Donald Trump says the United States will "successfully" deal with North Korea’s warning of a “Christmas gift.”

In an interview with Press TV on Friday, Etler, a former professor of Anthropology at Cabrillo College in Aptos, California, said, “President Trump, while professing ever-lasting love for his younger protégé Chairman Kim Jong-un of the Democratic Republic of Korea (aka North Korea) has cynically used relations with the DPRK as a ploy to meddle in East Asian affairs. Despite some pro-forma war-mongering rhetoric emanating from the Pentagon, Trump has no intentions of ‘going to war’ with North Korea. Neither does he want to resolve tensions on the Korean peninsula.”

“Keeping China, South Korea and Japan guessing about his overall policy in East Asia serves his purposes well, by keeping his ‘adversaries’ off-balance. This allows the US to better manipulate events to its own advantage, or that’s at least what Washington under the Trump Doctrine thinks,” he stated.

“Trump has no intention of meeting North Korea’s just demands, an end to sanctions or at least their incremental lessening for progress in demilitarizing the peninsula. He would rather keep everyone on tenterhooks than resolve the issues that have divided Korea for generations. This way he can play off the regional powers of China, the Republic of Korea and Japan against each other in order to gain an advantage for himself against them all,” he added.

“Unfortunately for Trump, the East Asian powers are wise to his game and are forging new ties between themselves as evidenced by the recent summit between China, the Republic of Korea (aka South Korea) and Japan. It is imperative that the countries of Asia unite in opposition to US attempts to meddle in their affairs. US interventionism, which includes the illegal use of economic warfare, secondary sanctions and attempts to foment domestic destabilization in countries it targets for regime change, is the main enemy of the world’s people,” he noted.  

“Only a united front of sovereign nations dedicated to the 5 principles of peaceful co-existence, including mutual respect for each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty, mutual non-aggression, mutual non-interference in each other's internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, can lead to the continued development and prosperity of all the nations concerned. These principles have been the hallmark of Chinese foreign policy since the Bandung Conference in 1955 and still serve as the foundation of the international movement against US global hegemony,” he said.

“As regards the stance of the DPRK, its patience has worn thin. It has been waiting for Trump to respond to its overtures, to no avail. It feels it must give Washington a wake-up call to get things moving. Trump, preoccupied with impeachment and a collapsing foreign policy will try and keep the Korean issue on the back-burner so as not to jeopardize his re-election bid. Kim Jong-un has nothing to lose in upping the ante, and if the Asian countries put their differences aside the US will be left with little option but to reconcile itself to a change in the balance of forces in Asia and the demise of its influence in the Indo-Pacific region,” he concluded.

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