Bill Clinton’s Secretary Of Defense Likes Trump’s North Korea Strategy
HUFFINGTON POST
President Donald Trump’s strategy of threatening North Korea could set “the stage for successful diplomacy” to limit the hermit nation’s nuclear program, William J. Perry, Bill Clinton’s second secretary of defense, told The Huffington Post in an interview.
Perry, who endorsed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race, has been advising presidents on nuclear activity since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. A mathematician by trade, he has devoted much of his time since his government work to nuclear disarmament through the William J. Perry Project, a nonprofit he founded....[He argues that] the U.S. needs to be seen as a credible threat to North Korea for diplomacy to be an option.
By sending North Korea a message that a military strike is indeed on the table, Trump could create an environment where diplomacy might be possible — and limit the cooperation between the country and China.
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The first step to a successful North Korea strategy is leading the country to “believe that we’re serious about military action,” Perry said. “They did not believe that during the Obama or the Bush administrations. They believe it now.”
“We have never been able to get China to cooperate with us in the past, but China now is fully convinced that North Korea’s action is posing dangers to their own security.”
The facts on the ground have also changed. For many years, China didn’t think Pyongyang was capable of building a sizable nuclear arsenal, Perry noted. “That was wrong,” he said.
“In addition, North Korean aggression could propel South Korea and Japan to build their own nuclear weapons,” he said, “which would be very undesirable to [China].”
China is responsible for so much of North Korea’s economy ― it is North Korea’s largest trade partner, and 90 percent of North Korean oil imports come from China ― that any Chinese pressure could bring results, Perry said.
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| President Trump with President Xi Jinping of China at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., this month. The Trump administration has urged Mr. Xi to exert greater pressure on North Korea. Doug Mills/The New York Times |
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North Korean leaders are rational enough to respond to Chinese pressure, Perry argued: They may be reckless, but they are shrewd. “They’ve taken a very weak hand and they’ve played it very shrewdly,” he said. “Their objective was to sustain their regime and they have succeeded, and they think that their nuclear program has played a big role.”
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