Odd Couple: North Korea & America

The sails of US Asian policy ride on the winds of North Korean belligerence.

Surveillance aircraft are monitoring North Korean activity during the
latest joint naval exercise between US and S. Korean forces
- just days after a similar exercise started a deadly artillery exchange.

by Tony Cartalucci

On March 26, 2010, the ROKS Cheonan is hit by what appears to be a German-made torpedo, sinks while claiming the lives of 46 South Korean sailors. The world, America at the lead, was quick to point its finger at North Korea before South Korea itself ruled them out as a suspect. North Korea adamantly insisted it was not behind the attack, and despite their paranoid and isolated posture little beyond insanity could serve as a motive.

Despite evidence adding up otherwise, to no one's surprise a joint "international" investigation by the US, UK, South Korea, Australia, Canada, and Sweden would later conclude that a North Korean submarine was the culprit, leaving even South Koreans skeptical.

During this period of time, America's position in Asia Pacific was already waning. Endless war in Central Asia and the Middle East, along with deepening economic crisis in the West allowed other actors to begin eying the seemingly inevitable void soon to be left. Japan under then Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, began reasserting itself over unpopular US military installations scattered throughout the nation. China was continuing to expand its economic and diplomatic influence in the region, luring in even America's traditional allies like Australia and Thailand.

The sinking of the ROKS Cheonan then "serendipitously" served as a reminder as to why America claims their troops and influence are needed in the region for "peace and security." The Korean Won tumbled as the US Dollar was temporarily bolstered and Japanese PM Hatoyama not only conceded to US demands regarding US installations, but would also resign over the matter. Literally citing the mysterious, still unsolved sinking of the Cheonan, Washington insisted its need to reassert itself in Asia to counter North Korea, if not for any other reason.

North Korea, either out of shadowy complicity or because of its paranoid predictable nature, became America's greatest ally in many ways.

November 2010, a similar scenario is playing out after the recent artillery exchange between North and South Korea which claimed several lives. America was again bolstered in its highly tenuous position not only in Asia as a whole, but on the Korean Peninsula itself, having been rebuffed on the US-Korean FTA and facing the possibility of US banking interests meeting with Tobin taxes in the Korean markets.

South Korean leadership now admits they were conducting joint US-Korean live fire exercises close to highly contested waters in the Yellow Sea before the exchange took place. North Korea maintains this incident was intentionally provoked, as was the sinking of the Cheonan, as contrived incidents of opportunity for the waning American empire to reassert itself.

In fact, much of what North Korea claims in official statements is now confirmed by the mainstream media, though the average reader might not know this because North Korean statements are either completely censored by South Korea's Korean Communications Standard Commission (KCSC) as is the case for www.uriminzokkiri.com, or cherry picked by the West's more subtle form of censorship; spin. Official North Korean statements can be found below.

North Korea's version of the recent November skirmish...

http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2010/201011/news25/20101125-01ee.html

And here is North Korea's version of the ROKS Cheonan's sinking...

http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2010/201005/news26/20100526-19ee.html

And like the sinking of the Cheonan, America once again renews the rhetorical lease on its presence in Asia Pacific. A financial and political chill is trying to take hold over the protectionist climate growing in the face of America's collapsing economy and even worse remedies like the Federal Reserve's Quantitative Easing (QE2).

How long this chill lasts and whether it takes hold depends not as much on the madman in Pyongyang, but on the madmen in Washington reversing their self-inflicted economic and geopolitical decline in coincidence with yet another attempt to reassert themselves regionally. While such a reverse is unlikely especially when the prescription is more of the same uninspired, antiquated policies that created the decline in the first place, in the interim, the United States and the globalists can depend on North Korea as the only consistent factor in an otherwise changing region.

Like ship sails to the wind, American foreign policy makers are outstretched and ready to harness North Korea's belligerence, and in the case of the Cheonan, apparently blow on the sails themselves when the winds are calm. A reclusive hereditary communist dictatorship is scary, those with no qualms utilizing such a dictatorship at the risk of regional or world war, are even scarier.

Worth repeating, was Donald Rumsfeld's position on the board of directors of ABB out of Zurich, when the engineering firm sold North Korea the nuclear technology they later used as the basis of their nuclear arms program. Rumsfeld would then later, as Secretary of Defense in the ever revolving door between big business and globalist government, leverage the enhanced menace of North Korea against America's supposed ally in the south.

This reality highlights that the stability America represents in Asia Pacific is not one of rule of law and healthy foreign diplomacy, but rather one of holding stability over the head of the region with the constant threat of unhinging peace through carefully arranged events, be it staging Maoist color revolutions in Bangkok, funding the Khmer Rouge or now, in 2010 training land grabbing troops in Cambodia, or provoking an unstable military dictatorship on the Korean Peninsula.

If China, Japan, or South Korea can offer a substantial alternative focused on cooperation without the need to mercilessly strip national sovereignty and force integration, then the manipulative invasive nature of the Anglo-American banking elite and their empty globalization agenda, no matter how much peace America manages to unhinge, will be all but expelled from the region.

Conflicts of Convenience

North Korea's Latest Attack on South Korea


By Tony Cartalucci

President Barrack Obama's opulent tour of Asia this month included talks with South Korea over free-trade agreements. Those talks ultimately failed, Thursday, November 11, 2010, sending the bewildered president back home reinforcing to the world the weak hand America is now playing. This failed free-trade agreement between the US and South Korea is a continuation of President Bush's failed efforts during the latter part of his administration to push through the deal.

Asian markets continued to gain ground as the veneer of confidence in the US dollar and Western finance in general peels and falls to the ground. The problem for the West is compounded by Asia and other exporters erecting barriers around their monetary system to prevent currency manipulation and speculation.

Respected geopolitical analyst, Dr. Webster Tarpley observed that Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and Brazil have begun to control capital and exchange rates to protect their respective markets. Thailand and South Korea in particular are considering Tobin taxes, essentially taxes to penalize the sort of short-term speculation that has created the current economic crisis in the first place.



Tobin taxes directly strip speculating investors the tools of globalist economic manipulation they have used with such great effect during the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, and more recently in crippling European economies ahead of austerity and fire sales to pay back debt incurred by such wild (or engineered) speculation.

Protectionism runs contra to globalism, Tobin taxes the garlic to the banker's vampires. With unified European markets looking weak relative to the more protectionist Asian countries, and Ireland's government requesting a "rescue" from the IMF and EU, the peeling veneer of faith in the globalists' system seemed to be falling and taking chunks of the wall with it too.

Then, almost as if on cue, North Korea, Tuesday, November 23, 2010, opened fire on the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong, killing one South Korean Marine, injuring seriously several others including civilians and destroying homes located on the island.

South Korean, Japanese, and Chinese markets lost ground on the news as investors peeled funds away to place them in "safer" locations such as the US Dollar, lending the temporary illusion of strength and viability to the globalists' system during the initial phases of imposing crippling austerity on Ireland and sprinting through several more legs of their agenda.

Staged events, tipping off hot spots, and massive distractions, along with direct and proxy attacks on nation-states not playing well with the globalist agenda are nothing new. Color revolutions have plagued protectionist Thailand, now also considering Tobin taxes, since globalist minion Thaksin Shinwatra was ousted from power in a military coup.

Globalist think-tanks such as George Soros' and Zbigniew Brzezinski's International Crisis Group, and the Chatham House have overtly supported Thaksin Shinwatra's efforts to overthrow the Thai government via a "people's power" revolution and the creation of a single party government under Thaksin Shinwatra, and in turn of course, his foreign sponsors.

Similar colored revolutions were stoked in Eastern Europe, and more recently in Iran.

North Korea, like a pre-US election Bin Laden tape, always seems to come through in a pinch for the globalist agenda. As reported in an Infowars.com article "North Korea: An Enemy Made in the U.S.A." by Kurt Nimmo, it was America itself who provided North Korea with its nuclear technology and ultimately responsible for the threat it has become today.

While Iraq was invaded and mercilessly plundered based on contrived evidence of possessing weapons of mass destruction, North Korea menaced the world openly by detonating actual nuclear weapons during tests, and launching missiles toward Japan, with all but superficial reprimands.

Indeed, North Korea acts more like a leashed attack dog, an agitator for hire in the Asian region, rather than a rouge nation. To maintain a Hegelian dialectic to keep US forces in South Korea, Japan, and ever creeping into Asia with globalization, and when the globalists need help with their agenda the most, North Korea seems to answer the call. With North Korea now menacing the South, perhaps continued talks between South Korea and the United States will be more "productive" than the publicly failed talks earlier this month.