News & Comment
Trump and Kim Summit Meeting is Not for Peace and Security

News

As US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un fly into Singapore for their 12 June summit meeting, an opinion piece at aljazeera.com, headlined ‘How 11 US presidents failed to make peace with North Korea’, highlights what should be obvious – the fact that the US has consistently worked against peace and security on the Korean peninsula:

“Contrary to popular perception, the core issue to be resolved at the June 12 summit - and any subsequent meetings - between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is not North Korea's denuclearisation. Pyongyang's willingness to denuclearise is already clear.

What is not clear, however, is whether the US is prepared to give North Korea the guarantee of its security which is its main demand. There is no doubt that Pyongyang can disable and dismantle its nuclear arsenal. It is only a question of process.

But it will not do so if the US insists on unilateral denuclearisation without any reciprocal commitment. To paraphrase George Kennan, a renowned US diplomat: A concept of national security that fails to concede the same legitimacy to the security needs of others lays itself open to moral reproach.

In this sense, the historical record of US failures to deliver peace and security to the Korean Peninsula is discouraging. Successive US administrations have failed to offer and guarantee a security arrangement acceptable to Pyongyang and have repeatedly walked away from opportunities to strike a deal.

The recent remarks by National Security Adviser John Bolton and Vice President Mike Pence - which quickly led to a flare-up in rhetoric and a temporary suspension of the planned summit - show that such attitudes persist in Washington. It was this type of thinking that made US negotiators choose the language of machismo, ideological posturing and confrontation over compromise 64 years ago.”

Comment

The only thing distinguishing Trump, at this point, from his predecessors is his amateur inexperience in politics; otherwise he is quite faithfully adhering to the American playbook, at least the unilateralist version of it, whether on Iran, or tariffs, or China, or North Korea.

America’s acts in accordance with grand strategic objectives. America is the one that created the Korean problem with its invasion of the Korean peninsula after World War II. And America is the one that has prolonged the Korean problem through more than six decades.

Maintaining a state of war with North Korea has provided America with the justification for its significant military presence in South Korea throughout this period of time. It also helps justify the important America military base in Japan. American militarisation of the Western Pacific has two objectives: firstly to secure the Pacific Ocean, which America considers its private waters; and secondly to encroach upon the Chinese and Russian borders so as to counter any eastward expansion on their part. Trump thus has no intention of settling the Korean issue; at most he will seek the dismantling of Korean ICBMs that can target America, in return for the easing of economic sanctions that could also benefit America by being designed to reduce North Korean economic dependence on China.

The American political mentality is fully shaped by its Capitalist ideology, which developed from the Christian West’s evil secular compromise with the values and ideals of selfish materialistic atheism. This translates at the national level to an imperialistic foreign policy that seeks exploitation of, and hegemony over, the entire planet. In barely two centuries, this satanic Western ideology has brought the world to the brink of destruction from multiple existential threats: nuclear, biological, chemical, ecological, economical, financial, the list goes on. But perhaps the greatest crime of all is that the West has rewritten history to airbrush out the millennium of peace and justice that prevailed in the Islamic Age, during which the Khilafah (Caliphate) State was the global superpower, spreading knowledge, and prosperity, and high civilizational values to all the peoples of the world. It was the Islamic Age that provided the conditions for Western civilisation to advance and for Chinese civilisation to prosper. But the West abandoned its Christianity, lusting after the spoils of this world, ultimately even provoking China out of its peaceful existence, and deviously placing it on a militaristic path only so that America could benefit from a Chinese counterweight to the Soviet Union. Now that same Chinese counterweight has become America’s foremost global concern.

The world will never be at peace as long as it is dominated by the materialistic secular Capitalist West. With Allah’s permission, humanity shall soon again experience worldwide peace and justice with the re-establishment of the righteous Islamic Khilafah State on the method of the Prophet (saw), implementing Islam internally and carrying its light to the entire world, confronting, containing and then calming the conflicts of the world, and reviving a civilisation that rejects base materialism and makes spirituality its foundation, adhering to noble ayaat of the Qur’an such as the following:

(يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُواْ كُونُواْ قَوَّامِينَ لِلّهِ شُهَدَاء بِالْقِسْطِ وَلاَ يَجْرِمَنَّكُمْ شَنَآنُ قَوْمٍ عَلَى أَلاَّ تَعْدِلُواْ اعْدِلُواْ هُوَ أَقْرَبُ لِلتَّقْوَى وَاتَّقُواْ اللّهَ إِنَّ اللّهَ خَبِيرٌ بِمَا تَعْمَلُونَ)

“O you who believe, be persistently standing firm for Allah as witnesses in justice, and do not let the hatred of a people prevent you from being just. Be just, for that is nearer to righteousness. Fear Allah, for verily, Allah is aware of what you do.” [Quran 5:8]

And hadith of the Messenger (saw) such as the following:

«اتَّقُوا دَعْوَةَ الْمَظْلُومِ وَإِنْ كَانَ كَافِرًا فَإِنَّهُ لَيْسَ دُونَهَا حِجَابٌ»

“Beware of the supplication of the oppressed, even if he is an unbeliever, for there is no screen between it and Allah.”

It was because of this that voices within the declining Byzantium Empire said, when confronted with the Ottoman Khilafah on one side and the Roman Church on the other: ‘Better the Turkish Turban than the Papal Tiara’.

Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by
Faiq Najah