U.S. Must Send ‘Unmistakable Signal We Are Deadly Serious’ About North Korea

Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney joined SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Wednesday’s Breitbart News Daily to talk about tensions in North Korea, and the security ramifications of immigration reform in the United States.

Gaffney noted that North Korea is “not simply mounting an ever-greater threat to this country by itself,” but rather is working in concert with Iran to develop missiles and nuclear warheads.

“This is a serious, growing, and potentially absolutely existential threat to the United States,” he warned, noting that a single nuclear weapon detonated over the United States could take down the national electric grid with an electromagnetic pulse attack.

“If you want to think about what that might be like for you, for your family, for your businesses, look at Puerto Rico,” he suggested. “It’s potentially a nation-ending problem.”

“Whether American military personnel on the Korean peninsula are being told to stand up, or whether the supersonic bombers are being flown over the Korean peninsula, or naval assets are being put forward, all of those are eminently sensible things to be doing – as is, I believe, absolutely torquing the Chinese, something President Trump has begun doing,” he said.

Gaffney cited sanctions against Chinese banks that are “providing life support to North Korea, which of course the Chinese government has been doing for decades” as an example of how pressure can be raised against Beijing.

“We need to do one other thing,” he added. “Admiral Ace Lyons, one of the great military men of our time, said to me on our little radio show Secure Freedom Radio yesterday that we need to pull American dependents out of South Korea. That would send an unmistakable signal that we are deadly serious about this problem. I think it’s high time we do that.”

Gaffney said the situation in North Korea is still escalating, “not because of Donald Trump’s tweets,” but because the North Koreans believe they still enjoy Chinese protection.

“The Chinese I think have not disabused them of this,” he said. “In fact, I believe the Chinese think this is in their interest, to have these bad boys, these proxies, threatening us and increasingly having the capability to act on those threats, at the very moment, of course, the Chinese are working assiduously to consolidate their control of the South China Sea and actually expand their power elsewhere around the world.”

On immigration reform, Gaffney said President Trump “signaled weeks ago that he was willing to work with the Democrats to legalize this amnesty for the so-called DACA individuals – eight hundred and some thousand of them, we’re told.”

“He didn’t make clear at the time, but he has subsequently, to his credit, said that there are certain things that the Democrats have to concede on in order to do that,” he added. “They’re screaming like bloody murder because they don’t want to do any of these things. They’re not interested in border security. They’re not interested in interior enforcement of the law, or other sensible immigration policy initiatives – one of which, at the bare minimum, has to be that the DACA kids’ extended families don’t get amnesty as well. That gets you up to three and a half million in a heartbeat.”

“The truth of the matter is, the president is absolutely right in insisting on these kinds of changes as the price for DACA. If he doesn’t get these kinds of changes – if we don’t get sensible immigration, border security, and interior enforcement policies – there should not be an amnesty for DACA kids, period,” Gaffney said.

“The president, I think, has the whip hand here,” he judged when Marlow observed that Trump’s voters would be displeased by any grand immigration bargain that does not respect the needs of American workers, national security, and the rule of law. “I’m just greatly pleased that he has decided that he is going to demand things from the Democrats as well. You know, it looked as though he was going to throw in the towel and give them what they wanted without getting what he knows we need.”

“I think the American people supported Donald Trump to be president because he was talking about this kind of agenda – to seal our borders, obviously, to ensure that we were not creating new magnets for more illegal aliens to come here, to compete for jobs or to undermine our security,” he said.

“And not least, to prevent people who don’t share our values from coming here in the first place,” Gaffney added. “Importing more jihadists, for example. These are eminently sensible, defensible things.”

“Steve Bannon, as you know better than I, is talking about taking this to the country, these kinds of issues, giving people choices,” he observed, referring to Breitbart News Executive Chairman and former White House strategist Steve Bannon’s midterm election project. “If the Republicans in the Senate or the Republicans in the House don’t want to support the president on these sorts of things, I think they’re going to find themselves out of work, and that’s as it should be.”

Marlow said it was “good news” that the Supreme Court has thrown out one of the legal challenges to President Trump’s travel ban.

“It’s all very positive that the Supreme Court is serving in kind of an adult supervisory role for a bunch of lower courts that have behaved abominably, developing their own new laws, their own new restrictions on presidential authority – both that implicit in the Constitution and that is statutorily given to the president by Congress.” Gaffney agreed.

He added that it was “clearly done for only one reason: because it’s Donald Trump who is President of the United States.”

“I’m delighted that the Supremes are weighing in,” he said, offering listeners the chance to review an amicus brief filed by the Center for Security Policy arguing that “you need to have a filter on new immigration.”

“It’s a good thing to have an immigration pause,” Gaffney explained. “It’s a good thing to be able to restrict, as the president should, dangerous people from coming here. One way of doing that, as we did in the past with Nazis and Communists, is to say if you are a sharia supremacist, actually we don’t want you in the country. Thanks but no thanks. I think that’s a tremendously important byproduct of all this that I hope the Court will take up as well.”