The ‘Peace Through Strength’ Alternative

I am a pretty big fan of Tucker Carlson. His Fox News show is terrific, mostly. Last night, it aired a prized one-on-one interview with President Trump along with up-close footage from Mr. Trump’s visit to the Demilitarized Zone of a sickly North Korean tyrant Kim Jong-Un and his security thugs.

In fact, Tucker seemed kind of fixated on the “heavies” aggressively protecting Kim, evidently from White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham and Western journalists.  He showed image after image of them taken on his cellphone with editorial comments about their being “the most sinister group I have seen, ever” and “their faces tell you a lot.”

The truth is, Tucker was capturing the face of terrifying evil that is everywhere in the monstrous police state that lay just steps from where those pictures were taken. And it is the extension of that horror throughout the Korean peninsula that remains Kim Jong-Un’s goal.  The North’s nuclear weapons program is meant not only to guarantee his regime’s survival, but to induce the appeasement-minded South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, to agree to unification basically on Kim’s terms.

The principal impediment to such a disaster – for the people of South Korea and for our interests in East Asia – is the presence of American forces in the country under the operational command of the U.S. military.  That would be “the status quo” that has prevented war on the peninsula for over six decades and continues to do so today.

Unfortunately, even as Tucker was conveying an important, if subliminal, message about the true, odious and abidingly dangerous nature of Kim Jong-Un and his regime, he reprised a favorite theme with one of his most regular guests: retired Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor. On this occasion, they did one of their oft-repeated duets denouncing the “neo-cons” in Washington and others they insist are determined to get us into wars, for profit or simply because of a shared enthusiasm for endless warfare. In such programming, National Security Advisor John Bolton is usually vilified in a particularly ad hominem fashion as a prime example of the “warmongers.

During recent programs, Tucker has pulled in other, like-minded commentators, including radical leftist Glenn Greenwald and libertarians from the misleadingly named American Conservative magazine to promote that vicious trope. In this one, however, Col. Macgregor was on his own, and he used the opportunity to pronounce a series of statements that sounded eerily like North Korean propaganda.

For example, he asserted that there is today “one Korean nation” and that Moon Jae-un speaks for the majority of its people – i.e., all those in North Korea and some in South Korea – who want unconditional unification, now.  He blithely claims that, if that happens, Kim’s regime “simply won’t survive” contact between the Korean nation’s northern and southern populations. Consequently, we must abandon the odious “status quo,” implement immediately “an end of war declaration” and turn over operational command of all allied forces on the peninsula to Moon and his generals.

The truth is that there is something considerably worse than the status quo in Korea. That would be the inexorable extension of the North’s police state to the South – a decided possibility, if not the certain result, of Col. Macgregor’s recommendations. We cannot assume that the Kim regime will wither away since it would surely be propped up by Moon Jae-in and his coterie of pro-North advisors. They have, among other things, been actively dismantling the South’s military and defenses and entrusting them with commanding the U.S. forces that have guaranteed South Korea’s sovereignty and security is a formula for terminating both.

Tucker Carlson is certainly smart enough to know that there is an alternative to fighting wars endlessly and needlessly and what abandoning the field to our abiding enemies in places like Korea and the Persian Gulf.  Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump have called it “peace through strength.” John Bolton is an authentic conservative, not a neo-con, who has practiced this strategy for decades, including under both of these extraordinary Commanders-in-Chief. President Trump deserves great credit for doing so with his help.

One of the most admirable features of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” is the host’s willingness to mix it up with people with opposing views. This topic should be no exception. Tucker’s audience deserves to be briefed about the Trump “peace through strength” alternative to endless war and surrender.

Frank J. Gaffney acted as an Assistant Secretary of Defense under President Reagan.  He is the Executive Chairman of the Center for Security Policy.