Options for dealing with North Korea: North Korea has killed an American, Otto Warmbier, and it holds three more Americans as prisoners. What can the United States do? Rebeccah Heinrichs:
“Families of the hostages might call for restraint. But Otto’s fate demonstrates that unless the United States forces Pyongyang to assess it is not in its interest to harm them, we have no reason to think their fate will be better than Otto’s.”
Heinrichs recommends:
“Require — not ask — the Peoples Republic of China to comply with U.N. sanctions. Even though China has signaled it may be more willing to comply with the Trump administration’s demands than it was with the previous U.S. administration, we have seen this act before. About 90 percent of North Korea’s trade remains with China. This cannot stand. The United States must impose secondary sanctions against Chinese entities that are facilitating North Korea’s prohibited nuclear weapon and missile programs. The previous administrations failed to do this. President Trump’s should not. […]
“This one will take more time, but the Trump administration must expand the U.S. missile defense (MD) deployments in the Pacific region and on the U.S. homeland. The United States has various MD systems in place in South Korea and Japan and the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system remains the only system deployed to protect the U.S. homeland. The Obama administration significantly cut the GMD program. The Missile Defense Agency has been playing catch-up ever since. The recently released defense budget did not reflect President Trump’s public commitment to defense, let alone missile defense. This must be remedied by significantly boosting the entire defense budget, and especially missile defense, with an emphasis on homeland defense.” [Hudson Institute]
