Following Sunday's failed medium-range missile test by Kim Jong-Un, President Donald Trump has been evaluating his response options and according to Bloomberg, which cited a "person familiar with his thinking", is willing to consider ordering "kinetic" military action, including a sudden strike, to "counteract North Korea’s destabilizing actions in the region"
However, before launching another offensive campaign - or war as some would call it - Trump’s preference is for China to take the lead on dealing with North Korea, according to the source.
While still afforded the luxury of time, Trump may be forced to decide soon how to respond: on its take on the ongoing North Korea crisis, the New York Times said in a front-page article that "what is playing out, said Robert Litwak of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, ... is 'the Cuban missile crisis in slow motion,' but the slow-motion part appears to be speeding up."
That said, Trump’s reported strategy isn’t a radical departure from long-standing U.S. policy. As Bloomberg writes, "he isn’t particularly interested in toppling the regime of leader Kim Jong Un and isn’t looking to force a reunification of the two Koreas, the person said. He instead wants to push for their long-term cooperation."
This was followed by National Security Adviser General H.R. McMaster, who used familiar language Sunday to describe North Korea’s “provocative and destabilizing and threatening behavior,” while leaving all options on the table as his team helps develop plans of action for the region. In a previously reported interview Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” McMaster said Trump had directed the National Security Council to collaborate with the Defense and State Departments, and intelligence agencies to “provide options and have them ready for him if this pattern of destabilizing behavior continues.”
Hours after the failed test, McMaster emphasized Trump’s preference, as with this month’s airstrikes in Syria, for unannounced military action. He added that the North Korean leader’s unpredictability complicated U.S. strategy.
McMaster’s use of “provocative” and “destabilizing” to describe North Korea echoes administrations of both parties that have attempted to rally others on the global stage, including China, to help prevent fresh war on the peninsula. Trump used the language in his February visit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
Meanwhile, China has refused to commit to any specific course of action and as discussed earlier, Beijing made a plea for a return to negotiations. Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said Monday that tensions need to be eased on the Korean Peninsula to bring the escalating dispute there to a peaceful resolution. Lu said Beijing wants to resume the multi-party negotiations that ended in stalemate in 2009 and suggested that U.S. plans to deploy a missile defense system in South Korea were damaging its relations with China.
Ultimately, Trump may be in wait and see mode for the next week until all the available options are on the table: on April 25, the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier is expected to reach the South Korea east coast on April 25. If Trump is indeed pressed to make a swift decision, he will surely do so once air support is available next weekend, just as the first round of the French presidential election takes place.
CHINA and Russia have launched spy ships to chase a US naval task force away from Korea, according to reports.
With tensions rising in the region, Donald Trump ordered aircraft carrier the USS Carl Vinson to lead a strike force to the Korean Peninsula in a show of force.
Rival powers have now deployed intelligence gathering vessels, according Raw Story, citing Japanese government sources quoted in The Yomiuri Shimbun.
The ships may be intended as a warning to Washington after both countries cautioned the US about taking action in the region.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters earlier this week: “We call on all countries for restraint, we call on all the countries to refrain from any actions that could amount to provocative steps.”
And Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi echoed this statement, telling Pyongyang and Washington to step back from the brink before they set off down “an irreversible route”.
North Korea’s deputy UN ambassador today slammed the deployment of the naval task force to the region.
Kim In Ryong accused the US of turning the Korean Peninsula into “the world’s biggest hotspot” and creating “a dangerous situation in which a thermonuclear war may break out at any moment”.
He said the Trump administration’s deployment of the Carl Vinson nuclear carrier task group to waters off the Korean Peninsula again “proves the US’s reckless moves for invading the DPRK have reached a serious phase of its scenario”.
As FCC Chief Ajit Pai moves toward reversing the Obama administration’s version of “net neutrality” rules, AstroTurf “public interest groups” funded by a combination of Google, George Soros’ Open Society Institution and the Ford Foundation are lobbying hard to keep control of the Internet so as to be able to censor conservative news, including Infowars.com.
In 2015, the Obama FCC voted on party lines to pass regulations that gave the government more control over the Internet, which was sold to the U.S. public under the guise of “net neutrality.”
The regulations gave the government virtual control over the nation’s Internet infrastructure, with big government, “New Deal”-style, 1930s-based regulatory powers that extended to oversee virtually everything that transpires over the Internet, including content.
Since 2006, these three entities – Google, George Soros’ Open Society Institution and the Ford Foundation – have contributed more than $72 million to non-profit leftist organizations that have been most active in promoting the idea the Internet needs to be regulated by the government as a “common carrier” public utility under Title II of the Communications Act – the same regulatory framework crafted some 80 years ago to regulate the old rotary phone system.
Google and the largest communications giants on the Internet lobbied the federal government to define broadband under these 1930s-style regulations – a designation that would allow the government to regulate more rigorously the broadband providers that built the core network connecting users to the Internet as “common carriers.”
Of course, this exempts content monopolies like Google and Facebook from the strict regulations the FCC would apply to common carriers.
The implementation of these 2015 regulations, which were heavily pushed by Google in hundreds of closed-door meetings at the Obama White House, carved out Google and the other Silicon Valley behemoths, and secured their position as absolute information gatekeepers.
Since these 2015 regulations passed, Google and Facebook have moved to become the judge, jury and executioner of the contact we read on the Internet, under the guise of eliminating “fake news.”
Current and former employees of Google sit on the boards of several of the most active groups that spent millions to get the 2015 Obama rules passed by the FCC, and are now spending big to oppose the rollback of the FCC’s regulations.
Other board members include academics and consultants paid by Google as well as law firms that have represented Google in several legal matters.
While some leftist “public interest groups” pushing to keep in place the FCC’s “net neutrality” rules disclose some of the funding they have received from Google, most do not.
Under the Orwellian guise of “Internet freedom” and “civil liberties” these leftist “public interest” groups have fought since at least 2000 to achieve exactly the opposite – more government control of the Internet, fighting hard to secure and keep in place the Obama administration’s big government “net neutrality” regulations.
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