Portside

The war hawks are wrong when they say that past negotiations, like the 1994 Agreed Framework, didn’t make a difference. August 2017 was a reminder of the scariest, and riskiest, days of the Cold War. All month long, Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un engaged in a bitter war of words that escalated into tit-for-tat displays of military might and ended with mutual threats of mass destruction.

In the West, treatment of North Korea is one-sided and ahistorical. No one even gets the names straight. But if American commentators and politicians are ignorant of Korea’s history, they ought at least to be aware of their own.

Most nonproliferation experts — as well as former President Jimmy Carter and a number of former Pentagon and State Department officials, both Republican and Democrat — agree that the brutal and murderous Kim, for all his bluster, is not irrational or suicidal, but bent on preserving his regime and preventing a U.S. attack. Nuclear weapons are a defensive, not an offensive, tool for the North Korean leadership.

Reader Comments: Korea; Nagasaki; Nuclear Weapons; NAACP Warns Black Travelers When Visiting Missouri; Medicare March; Healthcare; How Democrats Can Win - How They Must Fight; UAW-Nissan Election Defeat; Venezuela; Vatican and Hard-Line Catholics; Last Chance to Comment Against KXL; Announcements: Zapatista Music Celebration; Feminist Organizing School; and more...

Against all odds, 122 countries agreed in July to ban nuclear weapons. At the heart of the United Nations treaty is an explicit ethical goal: to protect peoples of the world from the humanitarian catastrophe that would ensue if nuclear weapons were employed. Once 50 states ratify the treaty, it will enter into international law. The United States, the only country to use nuclear weapons, dropped the first atomic bomb on Aug. 6, 1945 at Hiroshima, and Aug. 9 on Nagasaki.

Reader Comments: Paris Climate Agreement - Withdrawing is a Crime; Free Speech on Campus; Ivanka's Shoes in China; The Unexpected Afterlife of American Communism; Jews Against Settlements; Hate Crimes; Wonder Woman; Whole Foods; Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor Attacked; Resources: Labor Activism; Immigration politics; Announcements: Union-Worker Coop - tomorrow; Webinar: Korea, Labor and Anti-Militarism; Women's March to Ban the Bomb; and more...

Reader Comments: We Remember - May 4, 1970; New Korean War?; Where is the Peace Movement; Pre-Existing Conditions; March on McDonald's May 23; Boycotts; Workers; Luddites; Marine Le Pen; California Single-Payer; Responses to Culture posts - Identity Politics; Picasso's Guernica; The Zookeeper's Wife; The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks; Lunch and Bologna; Donna Leon; The Handmaid's Tale; KNOW YOUR RIGHTS: What To Do If You're Stopped; The European Left; and more...

The Korean War was central to the militarization of our society and to the creation a national security state. It was an essential element in fostering racism, sexism and in the cutting of social programs - creating growing inequality. Today, the threat of a cataclysmic war between Washington and North Korea cannot be discounted. It is vital for the US public to know that North Korea has been asking for a peace treaty with Washington and Seoul for sixty-four years.

Reader Comments: Peoples Climate March and a Defense of Science; Korea; Danger of Nuclear War; Marine Le Pen is a Fascist, Not a Populist; Hawaii IS a State - Understand Jeff Sessions; GOP Health Plan - A Disaster; Attraction of Single-Payer; Airline Abuse, Profits and Deregulation; Fascism Today - Portside readers exchange views; Resources; Announcements-MAY DAY; Trump and the Left; Labor Film Festival; Left Forum; Oscar López Rivera is Coming to New York; and more...

Trump's wars are now all over the map. The peace movement can fight back by joining already thriving intersectional campaigns.