IN AN OPEN declaration that it is prepared to plunge the world into a nuclear war US imperialism has threatened that it ‘is prepared to use the full range of our capabilities to defend ourselves and our allies’ against North Korea.
These words were spoken by the US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, at a meeting of the Security Council to discuss a response to the successful test of an intercontinental ballistic missile by North Korea.
Haley was explicit saying: ‘One of our capabilities lies with our considerable military forces. We will use them, if we must, but we prefer not to go in that direction.’
The US might say it prefers not to go to war but it will unless North Korea capitulates.
This message that the war drums are beating in Washington for an all-out confrontation to smash North Korea and effect regime change even at the risk of a nuclear confrontation not just with North Korea but also with China and Russia was driven home by US President Donald Trump.
Trump said that he is considering some ‘very severe things’ in response to the launch and in his own inimitable way called on other nations to exert pressure on the country over its ‘very bad behaviour’.
The very bad behaviour that has prompted this declaration that the US is prepared to go to war is the refusal of the North Korean regime to tamely disarm itself.
North Korea has made it absolutely plain that it has developed nuclear capabilities not for ‘first strike’ purposes but as a defence from invasion by the US.
The North Korean people and their leaders are not stupid.
They have learnt the lessons of other countries that have succumbed to the pressure and promises of imperialism that if they give up their means of defence the western powers will embrace them in peace and friendship.
This was the lie peddled by Tony Blair to Libyan leader Colonel Gadaffi in 2003.
After negotiations with Blair the Libyan leader declared that his country was ready to ‘play its role in building a world free from all forms of terrorism’ by giving up its programme for developing weapons of mass destruction and allowing unconditional inspections.
Gadaffi paid for the mistake of trusting the imperialists with his life when he was murdered in 2011 by Islamic terrorists bombed to power in Libya by British and French imperialism.
Having disarmed Libya the country was ripe for regime change and a bloody struggle that has left Libya devastated and the lives of its people shattered by imperialism and its terrorist allies.
Similarly in Iraq where the regime of Saddam Hussein discovered that bowing the knee and disarming was no protection from an invasion justified by imaginary WMD’s conjured up by Bush and Blair.
North Korea has the absolute right to defend itself and to develop whatever weaponry, including nuclear, it deems necessary to protect it from similar invasion and regime change.
They are fully aware that this is exactly the strategic aim of US imperialism – to take out the North Korean regime and turn it into another armed US military base right on the borders with China, the country, along with Russia, seen by the US as the main obstacles in its divine right to rule the world.
Russia and China have both proposed that they will put pressure on North Korea to suspend its nuclear programme if the US ends military build up and the deployment of its own missile system in South Korea.
The US ruling class, the only one to have actually used atomic bombs to kill hundreds of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, will never agree to this. It wants world domination and will never disarm itself.
The working class must defend the right of North Korea to develop nuclear weapons as a means of defence against imperialism.
Imperialism is the cause of wars in its desperate quest to solve its crisis through re-conquering the world for capitalist exploitation.
The only way to prevent nuclear Armageddon today is not by disarming the North Koreans, who have never invaded anyone, but by disarming the imperialist powers through their overthrow by the victory of the world socialist revolution.
