NORTH KOREA’S ULTIMATUM TO AMERICA

What the US response will mean for stability in Asia and beyond.

The nuclear confrontation between the US and North Korea entered a critical phase Sunday with North Korea’s conduct of an underground test of a thermonuclear bomb.

If the previous round of this confrontation earlier this summer revolved around Pyongyang’s threat to attack the US territory of Guam, Sunday’s test, together with North Korea’s recent tests of intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the continental US, was a direct threat to US cities.




In other words, the current confrontation isn’t about US superpower status in Asia, and the credibility of US deterrence or the capabilities of US military forces in the Pacific. The confrontation is now about the US’s ability to protect the lives of its citizens.

The distinction tells us a number of important things. All of them are alarming.

First, because this is about the lives of Americans, rather than allied populations like Japan and South Korea, the US cannot be diffident in its response to North Korea’s provocation. While attenuated during the Obama administration, the US’s position has always been that US military forces alone are responsible for guaranteeing the collective security of the American people.

Pyongyang is now directly threatening that security with hydrogen bombs. So if the Trump administration punts North Korea’s direct threat to attack US population centers with nuclear weapons to the UN Security Council, it will communicate profound weakness to its allies and adversaries alike.

Obviously, this limits the options that the Trump administration has. But it also clarifies the challenge it faces.

The second implication of North Korea’s test of their plutonium-based bomb is that the US’s security guarantees, which form the basis of its global power and its alliance system are on the verge of becoming completely discredited.

In an interview Sunday with Fox News’s Trish Regan, former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton was asked about the possible repercussions of a US military assault against North Korea for the security of South Korea.

Regan asked, “What are we risking though if we say we’re going to go in with strategic military strength?… Are we going to end up with so many people’s lives gone in South Korea, in Seoul because we make that move?” Bolton responded with brutal honesty.

“Let me ask you this: how do you feel about dead Americans?” In other words, Bolton said that under prevailing conditions, the US faces the painful choice between imperiling its own citizens and imperiling the citizens of an allied nation. And things will only get worse. Bolton warned that if North Korea’s nuclear threat is left unaddressed, US options will only become more problematic and limited in the years to come.

This then brings us to the third lesson of the current round of confrontation between the US and North Korea.

If you appease an enemy on behalf of an ally then you aren’t an ally.

And eventually your alliance become empty of all meaning.

For 25 years, three successive US administrations opted to turn a blind eye to North Korea’s nuclear program in large part out of concern for South Korea.

Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama all sought to appease North Korea’s aggressive nuclear adventurism because they didn’t believe they had a credible military option to deal with it.

In the 1980s, North Korea developed and deployed a conventional arsenal of bombs and artillery along the demilitarized zone capable of vaporizing Seoul.

Any US military strike against North Korea’s nuclear installation it was and continues to be argued, would cause the destruction of Seoul and the murder of millions of South Koreans.

So US efforts to appease Pyongyang on behalf of Seoul emptied the US-South Korean alliance of meaning. The US can only serve as the protector of its allies, and so assert its great power status in the Pacific and worldwide, if it prevents its allies from being held hostage by its enemies.

And now, not only does the US lack a clear means of defending South Korea, and Japan, America itself is threatened by the criminal regime it demurred from effectively confronting.

Regardless of the means US President Donald Trump decides to use to respond to North Korea’s provocative actions and threats to America’s national security, given the nature of the situation, it is clear that the balance of forces on the ground cannot and will not remain as they have been.

If the US strikes North Korea in a credible manner and successfully diminishes its capacity to physically threaten the US, America will have taken the first step towards rebuilding its alliances in Asia.

On the other hand, if the current round of hostilities does not end with a significant reduction of North Korea’s offensive capabilities, either against the US or its allies, then the US will be hard pressed to maintain its posture as a Pacific power. So long as Pyongyang has the ability to directly threaten the US and its allies, US strategic credibility in East Asia will be shattered.

This then brings us to China.

China has been the main beneficiary of North Korea’s conventional and nuclear aggression and brinksmanship.

This state of affairs was laid bare in a critical way last month.

In mid-August, Trump’s then chief strategist Steve Bannon was preparing a speech Trump was set to deliver that would have effectively declared a trade war against China in retaliation for its predatory trade practices against US companies and technology. The speech was placed in the deep freeze – and Bannon was forced to resign his position – when North Korea threatened to attack the US territory of Guam with nuclear weapons. The US, Trump’s other senior advisers argued, couldn’t declare a trade war against China when it needed China’s help to restrain North Korea.

So by enabling North Korea’s aggression against the US and its allies, China has created a situation where the US has become neutralized as a strategic competitor.

Rather than advance its bilateral interests – like curbing China’s naval aggression in the South China Sea – in its contacts with China, the US is forced into the position of supplicant, begging China to restrain North Korea in order to avert war.

If the US does not act to significantly downgrade North Korea’s offensive capabilities now, when its own territory is being threatened, it is difficult to see how the US will be able to develop an effective strategy for coping with China’s rise as an economic and strategic rival in Asia and beyond. That is, the US’s actions now in response to North Korea’s threat to its national security will determine whether or not the US will be in a position to develop and implement a wider strategy for maintaining its capacity to project its economic and military power in the Pacific in the near and long term.

Finally, part of the considerations that need to inform US action now involve what North Korea’s success in developing a nuclear arsenal under the noses of successive US administrations means for the future of nuclear proliferation.

In all likelihood, unless the North Korean nuclear arsenal is obliterated, Pyongyang’s nuclear triumphalism will precipitate a spasm of nuclear proliferation in Asia and in the Middle East. The implications of this for the US and its allies will be far reaching.

Not only can Japan and South Korea be reasonably expected to develop nuclear arsenals. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and other inherently unstable Arab states can be expected to develop or purchase nuclear arsenals in response to concerns over North Korea and its ally Iran with its nuclear weapons program linked to Pyongyang’s.

In other words, if the US does not respond in a strategically profound way to Pyongyang now, it will not only lose its alliance system in Asia, it will see the rapid collapse of its alliance system and superpower status in the Middle East.

Israel, for one, will be imperiled by the sudden diffusion of nuclear power.

Monday morning, North Korea followed up its thermonuclear bomb test with a spate of threats to destroy the United States. These threats are deadly even if North Korea doesn’t attack the US with its nuclear weapons. If the US does not directly defeat North Korea in a clear-cut way now, its position as a superpower in Asia and worldwide will be destroyed and its ability to defend its own citizens will be called into question with increasing frequency and lethality.

Originally published by the Jerusalem Post

BREAKING: North Korea Fires Ballistic Missile Over Japan as Iran Preps for Striking Israel

“We assess North Korea conducted a missile launch within the last 90 minutes. We can confirm that the missile launched by North Korea flew over Japan,” Pentagon said in a statement a few hours ago.

With the above words, the world has entered into unchartered territory.  South Korea reports that its military has raised it alert level, while Japanes Prime Minister Abe warned his citizens to take the proper safety precautions. Ultimately the three ballistic missiles that flew over Japan have now pushed the likelihood of a major military confrontation between the USA and North Korea to a high probability.

This of course has come at the same time that it has become clear that Iran is now in position to strike Israel from both Lebanon and Syria, effectively choking Israel’s North.

As we have noted numerous times, both North Korea and Iran have a symbiotic relationship where one supplies the other with money while the other develops ballistic missiles and ultimately nuclear weapons.

As chaos seems be the new norm, the VIX (Voltility Index) which essentially is the markets measurement for global chaos skyrocketed.

And if markets are an indications of where things are going this tells us everything:

Most observers believe President Trump will now have no choice but to strike North Korea in some manner.  Of course we know that the Chinese will step in at that point.

Iran will not stand on the sidelines while its partner is attacked and should be expected to strike on Israel and the Golan.

These three missiles now place the world at a crossroads between the stability of the old order and the chaos that comes right before a new world.

All eyes are now on Trump.

North Korea, Israel, and the Light of Redemption

For several years now, I have written several posts about North and South Korea being in the Twilight Zone of our halakhic international dateline and the End of Days implications of their placement there.  As Rav Levi Sa’adia Nachmani zt”l said years ago. that the Great light of Mashiach will come from the following two cryptic verses from Parshat Ha’Azinu (Devarim 32:21-22):

כא  הֵם קִנְאוּנִי בְלֹא-אֵל,  {ר}  כִּעֲסוּנִי בְּהַבְלֵיהֶם;  {ס}  וַאֲנִי אַקְנִיאֵם בְּלֹא-עָם,  {ר}  בְּגוֹי נָבָל אַכְעִיסֵם.  {ס} 21 They have roused Me to jealousy with a no-god (atheism); they have provoked Me with their vanities (nonsensical pursuits); and I will rouse them to jealousy with a non-people (the PaLeStinians who are not a nation, just an Arab collection of  Squatters from Jordan and Egypt since the P(h).L.S(h). root in Hebrew means “to squat on someone else’s land”  This is true in all Semitic languages by the way.  The derogatory name for Ethiopian Jews in the Amharic language with the same P(h).L.S(h). root,  given them by Ethiopian Xtians, was FaLaShah or Squatters in their midst.); I will provoke them with a vile nation (Tzarfat or France).
כב  כִּי-אֵשׁ קָדְחָה בְאַפִּי,  {ר}  וַתִּיקַד עַד-שְׁאוֹל תַּחְתִּית;  {ס}  וַתֹּאכַל אֶרֶץ וִיבֻלָהּ,  {ר}  וַתְּלַהֵט מוֹסְדֵי הָרִים.  {ס} 22 For a fire (a nuclear blast) is kindled in My nostril, and burneth unto the depths of the nether-world (She’ol or Seoul, South Korea), and devoureth the earth with her produce, and setteth ablaze the foundations of the mountains.

Now Rav Nachmani seemed to insinuate that the North Korean nuclear program may have been first to be used on Seoul, South Korea or against Japan or even against the American Pacific Coast, but its final target address would at least be an attempt to nuke Eretz Yisrael.  So over the course of the past week we see this lo and behold, Israel had to bomb a convoy of hi tech missiles from North Korea that were being transported in Syria to Hezbollah!    So if the missile and high grade fissionable uranium and plutonium technology, which is being produced in North Korea and disbursed to their Axis of Evil ally in Persia, is now being disbursed to Syria and Hezbollah, we are right now not far away from at least an attempt to actualize Rav Levi Nachmani’s nightmare scenario.  These are telling moments and telling times while our Supreme Court focuses its evil efforts on the destruction of Jewish life in Yesha, the rest of the world makes no distinctions and focuses in on murdering all of us.  But alas they will not succeed.  G-d if overseeing this last and final ingathering of exiles which began in earnest in several stages over the last 100 years (1917, 1948, 1967, 1990-1991).  The last one was predicted by the Vilna Gaon.  The final push to ingather the exiles of Israel would take place 3/4 of the way through the 6th Millennium in the years 5750 and 5751 (1990- 1991) to fulfill the verse in Yeshayahu 27:13 that with the Teki’ah blast of a Great Shofar, the Lost ones in the Land of Ashur and the castaways in the Land of Egypt would come on Aliyah.  Since the Lost ones in Ashur were at least in part absorbed by the Khazar tribe, the tenth son of Togarmah (the Turks), who migrated north to form their 500 year kingdom between the Black and Caspian Seas and since the Khazar kingdom did convert en masse to Judaism because of the convincing arguments of Rav Yehudah Almangari (recorded in the Kuzari by Yehudah HaLeivi), and since Khazaria was destroyed by Russia around the year 1240ce dispersing Jews northward into the Pale of Settlement in Russia and the Ukraine mixing in with Ashkenzaic Jews migrating eastward, the ingathering of Russian Jewry which began in 1990 and the ingathering of the castaways from Egypt, Ethiopian Jewry, in Operation Shlomo and Sheba in 1991 were a tremendous fulfillment of this incredible prophesy, right on schedule according to the Vilna Gaon.  This ingathering began the last 250 years BEFORE Yom sheKulo Shabbat too.  According to Sefer HaLeshem, that final ingathering would take a maximum of 40 years so that Techiyah HaMeitim could begin by the year 5790, 40 years after 5750.

In order to continue this post, though, we need to pause for review of the following three posts that I wrote many years ago on this blog.

1.  The Koreas (Are) In the Twilight Zone  from December 31, 2005
and
2.  North Korea is Emerging from the Twilight Zone from September 17, 2007
and
3.  The Korean Peninsula is Inching Closer to World War from March 31, 2013

Also ponder the following from the Zohar VaEira 32a:

Zohar 32a continued, after discussing how the Children of Yishmael were given merit for 1300 years, 400 years after the last Tanna, Yehudah HaNassi, wrote down the Mishneh because of the emptiness of Eretz Yisrael.

At that time, a nation from the end of the earth (halakhically determined international dateline) will be aroused against evil Rome and wage war against it for three months. Nations will gather there, and [Rome] will fall into their hands, until all the children of Edom will gather against it [that nation] from all the corners of the world. Then G‑d will be roused against them. This is the meaning of: “For G‑d has a sacrifice in Botzrah”(Yishayahu 34:6). (Botzrah is the city in Iraq controlled by the Shi’ite Arabs at the behest of neighboring Iran. This points to an endtimes alliance between the nation at the edge of the world (N. Korea) and Persia/Iran.) And afterwards, it is written: “That it might take hold of the ends of the earth…” (Job 38:13) He will destroy the descendants of Ishmael from the land, and break all the powers of [all the nations’ guardian angels] Above. There will not remain any power of any people on earth, except the power of Israel alone. This is the meaning of “G‑d is your shadow upon your right hand”. (Psalms 121:5)

Here, below, is the preceding text for the above excerpt from the Zohar from the Kabbalah On Line website from Chabad.org:

Come and see: for four hundred years (after the year 4000 when Eretz Yisrael was being emptied of Jews), the Heavenly minister of the children of Ishmael stood and begged before G‑d. He said to Him, ‘whoever is circumcised has a portion in Your name’. He (G-d) said to him, ‘it is so’. He (Yishmael’s Minister) said to Him, ‘Behold Ishmael who is circumcised. Why does he not have a portion in You like Isaac?’ He said to him, ‘It is not so, the one (Isaac) was circumcised properly and according to the full requirements, while the other was not so’ [as Ishmael does not fulfill “periyah/uncovering of a fourth layer of skin after three are removed”]. Moreover, the ones (Children of Isaac) cleave to Me as is specified on the eighth day, while the others (Children of Ishmael) are distanced from me for many days[being circumcised only at age 13]. He [Ishmael’s guardian angel] said to Him, ‘But still in all, since he is circumcised, would he not have a good reward for this?’
[R. Hiyya then says] Woe is to the time that Ishmael was born into the world and was circumcised. What did G‑d do [to appease Ishmael]? He distanced the children of Ishmael from supernal cleaving and gave them [only] a portion below in the Holy Land (for 1300 years or 26 Jubilee cycles, 100 years (or more exactly 98 years) for each year when Ishmael was circumcised) on account of their circumcision.
And in the future, the children of Ishmael are destined to rule over the Holy Land for a long time when it is empty from anything, like their circumcision which is empty and imperfect. And they will prevent the children of Israel from returning to their place until the reward for the merit of the children of Ishmael reaches completion (26 Jubilee cycles of control of Eretz Yisrael in the merit of his imperfect circumcision).
The children of Ishmael [i.e. the Arab nations] will (THEN After their 1300 year reward) cause great wars in the world and the children of Edom will gather against them and wage war against them, one on the sea (First Persian Gulf War as lead by Gog H.W. Bush, Sr.), one on the dry land (2nd Persian Gulf War as lead by Gog ben Gog W Bush, Jr.), and one near Jerusalem (to be determined). And they [the children of Edom]will rule over them [the children of Ishmael], but the Holy Land will not be given over to the children of Edom. [The children of Edom is the Christian West, for Edom is Rome (see Num. 24:19Rashi) and Rome signifies Greece-Rome and the Roman Catholic Church, the foundations of Western Civilization]
Then, the following from above:

At that time, a nation from the end of the earth (halakhically determined international dateline) will be aroused against evil Rome and wage war against it for three months. Nations will gather there, and [Rome] will fall into their hands, until all the children of Edom will gather against it [that nation] from all the corners of the world. Then G‑d will be roused against them. This is the meaning of: “For G‑d has a sacrifice in Botzrah”(Yishayahu 34:6). (Botzrah is the city in Iraq controlled by the Shi’ite Arabs at the behest of neighboring Iran. This points to an endtimes alliance between the nation at the edge of the world (N. Korea) and Persia/Iran.) And afterwards, it is written: “That it might take hold of the ends of the earth…” (Job 38:13) He will destroy the descendants of Ishmael from the land, and break all the powers of [all the nations’ guardian angels] Above. There will not remain any power of any people on earth, except the power of Israel alone. This is the meaning of “G‑d is your shadow upon your right hand”. (Psalms 121:5)

Originally Published in Years of Awe.