The logic of imperialist aggression:
Will US threats against North Korea yield a global catastrophe?
6 September 2017
The unending series of inflammatory and reckless threats by Donald Trump and his top advisers against North Korea have provoked global fears that the world is being brought to the brink of a nuclear war and a catastrophic loss of human life.
The US president’s vow to unleash “fire and fury the like the world has never seen” has been followed by his National Security Adviser Gen. H.R. McMaster warning that Washington is prepared to wage a “preventive war”—a doctrine outlawed by the Nuremberg Nazi war crime trials—to stop North Korea “from threatening the United States with a nuclear weapon.” Trump’s defense secretary, Gen. James “Mad Dog” Mattis, declared Sunday that the Pentagon has “many options” to carry out “the total annihilation of a country, namely North Korea,” and that Trump was being “briefed on each one of them.”
Most recently, US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley declared Monday on the Security Council that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “is begging for war.” This has been combined with Trump’s chiding the South Korean government for attempting “appeasement” of Pyongyang, and repeated declarations that the time for talks has ended.
With each ratcheting up of these threats to unleash a nuclear conflagration, the question is posed with increasing force: Will Washington go to war to make good on its war rhetoric? Have the threats themselves—and the determination to prove they are not mere bluffs—become a driving force in the march to a potential nuclear war?
It is an article of faith within the Trump administration, the US military high command and powerful sections of the state…