Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has an op-ed in the Washington Post in which he calls for several measures to curb North Korea’s progress in developing nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles:
Four years ago, North Korea’s Rodong newspaper released a photograph of Kim Jong Un sitting in front of an intercontinental-ballistic-missile targeting map depicting Washington, Los Angeles and Austin. What once may have sparked laughter is no longer a joke. Kim’s latest successful ICBM test, last week, could make the entire continental United States vulnerable to a nuclear strike from Pyongyang.
We can no longer defer our response to this crisis. North Korea has demonstrated time and again that it may upend the tenuous armistice along the 38th parallel at any moment and drag the United States and our allies into a devastating conflict. What the United States needs now is swift action backed by a realistic strategy to secure the denuclearization and reunification of the Korean Peninsula.
To his credit he does not propose war with North Korea. These are his three prescriptions:
- expedite the development of the Space-Based Interceptor program (SBI) to vitiate the threat
- impose sanctions on the Chinese banks that violate United Nations Security Council directives by facilitating the movement of money to North Korea
- Transmit counter-propaganda to the people of North Korea
Of those only imposing sanctions on Chinese banks would have the slightest effect on North Korea’s trajectory. To those could be added sanctions against companies or countries that employ North Korean workers. The gravest offenders in that category are China, Russia, Kuwait, Qatar, and UAE.
Oh goody, there’s NOTHING more authentically Conservative than propaganda, is there?
Let’s consider some history: back in the Good Old Days of the Korean War, it seemed the USAF dumped high explosives on every road intersection in North Korea, plastering a number of small towns and of course their inhabitants. There weren’t that many obvious targets after all, and the AF adopted a policy of smashing up any location where infiltrating Chinese troops might be hidden. I.e., any building still on a foundation.
Estimates are 600 thousand NK civilians died during the conflict (vs 400 thousand NK troops). (I’m stealing numbers from Encyclopedia Britannica here). This is history, by the way, not propaganda. For some reason, it seems to have left many North Koreans with the impression that Americans don’t really like them.
So we should do our best to lower their living standards, threaten their existence, and provide them with continuous coverage of how wonderful liberty and the free market can be. They’ll become our friends immediately.
How can these wonderful ideas possibly fail?