Trumpsters are hoping that President Trump is able to enter into a peace treaty with North Korea that brings an end to the Korean War. If Trump is successful, the Trumpsters say, then he should receive the Nobel Prize for Peace.
Actually, if such a peace treaty does come to pass, it would be more appropriate for Trump to receive the Nobel Prize for Death.
After all, the Trumpsters are praising Trump for pressuring North Korea into coming to the negotiating table. Let’s assume they are right. What pressure are they referring to?
They are referring to the increasingly brutal system of sanctions that Trump and his national-security establishment are enforcing against North Korea.
How would U.S. sanctions pressure North Korea into coming to the negotiating table and entering into a peace treaty?
By killing large numbers of North Korean people. That’s what the U.S. sanctions are designed to do — to cause massive economic suffering and death by starvation and illness among the North Korean populace, to such a great extent that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un finally cries uncle and agrees to “denuclearize” and enter into a peace treaty satisfactory to Trump, the Pentagon, and the CIA.
As President Nixon put it to the CIA back in 1970 with respect to a U.S. regime-change operation in Chile: “Make the economy scream!”
Americans have become so accustomed to sanctions as a U.S. foreign-policy tool that many of them hardly give the matter any thought. The fact that they are designed to kill innocent people as a way to achieve a political goal just doesn’t factor into the equation, at least not in a moral sense. The deaths of innocent people are considered a legitimate way to achieve a desired political end.
We see this phenomenon in the mainstream, where pundits and reporters alike exult whenever it seems that U.S. sanctions on North Korea are starting to “bite.” By “bite,” they mean that the sanctions are causing even more suffering, including death by starvation or illness among the North Korean populace.
It’s all considered worth it. The means — targeting a civilian population with death — justifies the end — regime change or forcing the foreign regime to accept terms and conditions satisfactory to U.S. officials.
How many North Koreans have died as a result of U.S. sanctions? It’s impossible to say. But one thing is for sure: sanctions are especially effective in a Third World country that has fully embraced a socialist economic system, such as North Korea. That’s because socialism already brings about a severely impoverished society. The sanctions, combined with the socialist economic system, serve as a perfect device to squeeze the life out of the North Korean populace.
The U.S. government employed this same tactic against the Iraqi people during the 1990s. For 11 years, U.S. officials targeted Iraq with one of the most brutal sanctions system in history. The death toll reached hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, principally children.
The goal of the Iraqi sanctions was the same as it is for the North Korean sanctions: to force Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to “disarm.” Throughout the 11 years of sanctions and massive death toll among the Iraqi children, U.S. officials made it clear that if Saddam “disarmed” by destroying his (supposed) weapons of mass destruction or if he simply left office, the sanctions would be lifted, which would thereby have enabled many Iraqi children to live. That’s why U.S. officials blamed the high death toll among the Iraqi children on Saddam. They said that he could have had the sanctions lifted any time he wanted by simply disarming or abdicating.
Was the high death toll among the Iraqi children worth it? In the eyes of U.S. officials, absolutely. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations during the Clinton administration, Madeleine Albright, stated the official position of the U.S. government when asked by “Sixty Minutes” whether the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children were worth it. Albright responded that while the issue was a difficult one, yes, the deaths were, in fact, “worth it,” just as Trump and the U.S. national security establishment believe that the deaths that U.S. sanctions bring to North Koreans are worth it.
If Saddam had abdicated or entered into a peace treaty with the United States that was satisfactory to U.S. officials, undoubtedly there would have been no shortage of Clintonistas proclaiming that Clinton deserved the Nobel Prize for Peace. In actuality, given the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children who were killed in the process of reaching that goal, it would have been more appropriate to have awarded Clinton the Nobel Prize for Death, just like President Trump.