Odd Couple: North Korea & America

The sails of US Asian policy ride on the winds of North Korean belligerence

Surveillance aircraft are monitoring North Korean activity during the
latest joint naval exercise between US and S. Korean forces
– just days after a similar exercise started a deadly artillery exchange.

Tony Cartalucci, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

On March 26, 2010, the ROKS Cheonan is hit by what appears to be a German-made torpedo, sinks while claiming the lives of 46 South Korean sailors. The world, America at the lead, was quick to point its finger at North Korea before South Korea itself ruled them out as a suspect. North Korea adamantly insisted it was not behind the attack, and despite their paranoid and isolated posture little beyond insanity could serve as a motive.

Despite evidence adding up otherwise, to no one’s surprise a joint “international” investigation by the US, UK, South Korea, Australia, Canada, and Sweden would later conclude that a North Korean submarine was the culprit, leaving even South Koreans skeptical.

During this period of time, America’s position in Asia Pacific was already waning. Endless war in Central Asia and the Middle East, along with deepening economic crisis in the West allowed other actors to begin eying the seemingly inevitable void soon to be left. Japan under then Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, began reasserting itself over unpopular US military installations scattered throughout the nation. China was continuing to expand its economic and diplomatic influence in the region, luring in even America’s traditional allies like Australia and Thailand.

The sinking of the ROKS Cheonan then “serendipitously” served as a reminder as to why America claims their troops and influence are needed in the region for “peace and security.” The Korean Won tumbled as the US Dollar was temporarily bolstered and Japanese PM Hatoyama not only conceded to US demands regarding US installations, but would also resign over the matter. Literally citing the mysterious, still unsolved sinking of the Cheonan, Washington insisted its need to reassert itself in Asia to counter North Korea, if not for any other reason.

North Korea, either out of shadowy complicity or because of its paranoid predictable nature, became America’s greatest ally in many ways.

November 2010, a similar scenario is playing out after the recent artillery exchange between North and South Korea which claimed several lives. America was again bolstered in its highly tenuous position not only in Asia as a whole, but on the Korean Peninsula itself, having been rebuffed on the US-Korean FTA and facing the possibility of US banking interests meeting with Tobin taxes in the Korean markets.

South Korean leadership now admits they were conducting joint US-Korean live fire exercises close to highly contested waters in the Yellow Sea before the exchange took place. North Korea maintains this incident was intentionally provoked, as was the sinking of the Cheonan, as contrived incidents of opportunity for the waning American empire to reassert itself.

In fact, much of what North Korea claims in official statements is now confirmed by the mainstream media, though the average reader might not know this because North Korean statements are either completely censored by South Korea’s Korean Communications Standard Commission (KCSC) as is the case for www.uriminzokkiri.com, or cherry picked by the West’s more subtle form of censorship; spin. Official North Korean statements can be found below.

North Korea’s version of the recent November skirmish…

http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2010/201011/news25/20101125-01ee.html

And here is North Korea’s version of the ROKS Cheonan’s sinking…

http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2010/201005/news26/20100526-19ee.html

And like the sinking of the Cheonan, America once again renews the rhetorical lease on its presence in Asia Pacific. A financial and political chill is trying to take hold over the protectionist climate growing in the face of America’s collapsing economy and even worse remedies like the Federal Reserve’s Quantitative Easing (QE2).

How long this chill lasts and whether it takes hold depends not as much on the madman in Pyongyang, but on the madmen in Washington reversing their self-inflicted economic and geopolitical decline in coincidence with yet another attempt to reassert themselves regionally. While such a reverse is unlikely especially when the prescription is more of the same uninspired, antiquated policies that created the decline in the first place, in the interim, the United States and the globalists can depend on North Korea as the only consistent factor in an otherwise changing region.

Like ship sails to the wind, American foreign policy makers are outstretched and ready to harness North Korea’s belligerence, and in the case of the Cheonan, apparently blow on the sails themselves when the winds are calm. A reclusive hereditary communist dictatorship is scary, those with no qualms utilizing such a dictatorship at the risk of regional or world war, are even scarier.

Worth repeating, was Donald Rumsfeld’s position on the board of directors of ABB out of Zurich, when the engineering firm sold North Korea the nuclear technology they later used as the basis of their nuclear arms program. Rumsfeld would then later, as Secretary of Defense in the ever revolving door between big business and globalist government, leverage the enhanced menace of North Korea against America’s supposed ally in the south.

This reality highlights that the stability America represents in Asia Pacific is not one of rule of law and healthy foreign diplomacy, but rather one of holding stability over the head of the region with the constant threat of unhinging peace through carefully arranged events, be it staging Maoist color revolutions in Bangkok, funding the Khmer Rouge or now, in 2010 training land grabbing troops in Cambodia, or provoking an unstable military dictatorship on the Korean Peninsula.

If China, Japan, or South Korea can offer a substantial alternative focused on cooperation without the need to merciless strip national sovereignty and force integration, then the manipulative invasive nature of the Anglo-American banking elite and their empty globalization agenda, no matter how much peace America manages to unhinge, will be all but expelled from the region.

Tony Cartalucci’s articles have appeared on many alternative media websites, including his own at Land Destroyer.

Recently by Tony Cartalucci
Oregon: FBI Thwarts Own Car Bomb