PETER APPS: Syria, South Korea and the new foreign policy dynamic
None of the military options for North Korea are good, and most risk sparking the conflict everyone wants to avoid – possibly while leaving the country’s nuclear program intact
If there was ever any doubt that President Donald Trump’s strike against Syria was also intended to send a message to Pyongyang, the deployment this weekend of a U.S. carrier strike group towards the Korean Peninsula should have cleared it up. There is now a strange symmetry to the two principal foreign policy crises the Trump administration is confronting: the civil war in Syria and North Korea’s growing nuclear weapons program. Each bisects Washington’s relations with its two primary geopolitical rivals, Russia and China. And neither offers an easy solution. Washington would like North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad gone. It believes North Korea’s nuclear ambitions risk a regional conflict, while Syria’s ongoing civil war is destabilizing the Middle East and providing havens for militant groups such as Islamic State.
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