Tokyo : The recent decision by US President Donald Trump to make John Bolton as his new national security adviser had sent wrong signals for the Asian country, South Korea. The reason behind such uneasiness is due to the strict stand by John Bolton who advocates military action against North Korea.
Bolton has for years called for a change in regime for North Korea even if force is to be used to exert pressure. The outgoing national security adviser, H.R. Mc Master, too advocated strict measures who talked about military options for making North Korea to leave its nuclear program.
But the present move by the US President to make him one of his advisor comes at a particularly sensitive time as the world deals with North Korea and South Korea planning to hold a summit for direct talks with the President Kim Jong Un at the end of April and Trump too planning to share the table for a cup of coffee along with him in May this year.
“By tapping Bolton, who has called for preemptive strikes against North Korea, Trump is sending a message to the regime, telling them that they should come out to talks in order to avoid such drastic military backlash,” said Kim Sung-han, a former South Korean vice foreign minister who is now dean of Korea University’s Graduate School of International Studies.
Boltan never ever gave up his hard line stance against North Korea since the time he served as undersecretary of state for arms control and ambassador to the United Nations during the then George W. Bush administration.
At that time, the North’s state Korea Central News Agency regularly denounced Bolton’s approach, calling him “human scum and a bloodsucker” and “a beastly man bereft of reason” who always suffers from a “psychopathological condition.”
But in his role as a commentator on Fox News, which is also Trump’s favorite Media network, he has had a pedestal to espouse his views.
“There’s an all-purpose joke here,” Bolton said this month when asked about North Korea’s conciliatory moves toward South Korea and, by extension, the United States. “Question: How do you know that the North Korean regime is lying? Answer: Their lips are moving.”
In a column in the Wall Street Journal at the end of February, Bolton wrote that the United States should not wait until it’s too late to launch military action against North Korea. “It is perfectly legitimate for the United States to respond to the current ‘necessity’ posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons by striking first,” he wrote.
In previous columns, he had written that the United States should go ahead with a military strike even if its allies in the region do not opine such.
“The U.S. should obviously seek South Korea’s agreement (and Japan’s) before using force, but no foreign government, even a close ally, can veto an action to protect Americans from Kim Jong Un’s nuclear weapons,” he wrote in August 2017, after North Korea had tested two intercontinental ballistic missiles.
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