Reuters « Dr Alf's Blog

English: area map of Pyongyang Category:North Korea (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

China‘s influential newspaper, Global Times, publishes an insightful op-ed on North Korea. It reports that China on Wednesday reminded relevant parties to fully implement UN Security Council resolutions, which do not only include putting pressure on Pyongyang using sanctions but also peaceful and diplomatic means to resolve the issue.

Source: North Korea issue stuck in a vicious cycle: experts – Global Times

The article highlights the difference between Western and Chinese expectations on North Korea. It takes a dim view of UK Prime Minister‘s statement from Tokyo that China needs to do more to restrain North Korea. The article is also quite critical of US policy in relation to North Korea. [For a Western perspective see yesterday’s NYT article]

The Global Times article fails to recognize that North Korea is the aggressor and is potentially threatening innocent people. It’s also in bad taste to highlight Japanese children seeking refuge under their school desks – this is code for ‘see, the mighty Japanese imperial army has no teeth now’.

The US must defend Japan and Guam, so we need to be very careful that North Korean escalations, don’t either deliberately or inadvertently, commit an act of war. Escalation to war level is a real risk and needs to be effectively mitigated. Trump’s tweets don’t help international diplomacy.

I don’t see who’s going to broker ‘peaceful and diplomatic means to resolve the issue’, so are we looking at war?

Thoughts?



Embed from Getty Images

There is no real evidence that trust in the EU and democracy is recovering and the economic problems which led to the youth unemployment problems that DrAlf writes about are still there and worsening.

The EU as a whole is £4.4 trillion GBP in debt and is not exporting enough to clear even a fraction of that debt other than in Germany and Holland which do enough to cover their needs but not much more.

The problems of the PIIGS remain, with Greece ready to implode financially and the rich countries of the EU refusing at the moment to bail Greece out. The Italian banks are insolvent, Portugal despite the best efforts of Professor Michael Porter of Harvard University to help the government there, remains stubbornly uncompetitive.

In France, Macron has yet to explain how he proposes to create French jobs in the face of technology and global competition whilst preserving the French way of life.

Europe may be recovering economically but the pace of that recovery is pitifully slow and insufficient to build hope and trust in a better future or deal with the prospect of doubled migration of economic migrants from the countries of the African Union aided and facilitated by President Erdogan.

John Gelmini