Why is it so hard to find reports in the mainstream media that don’t reflect Washington’s biases and hostilities? Does the mainstream media sense its agen­da is better served by making it look like North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un is raving mad while the United States is innocent?

Kim isn’t crazy. He knows what happens to the leaders of small nations targeted by the U.S. By building a nuclear deterrent, he’s doing the one thing within his power to save North Korea from the fate of Iraq, Libya and Syria.

During the 1990s, things didn’t seem so bleak. The U.S. and North Korea negotiated an agreement that included the cessation of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. But the U.S. did not keep its side of the deal.

The U.S. military footprint in the Korean Peninsula, coupled with needlessly provocative war games by Japan, South Korea and the U.S., designed to simulate an invasion of North Korea and a “decapitation” operation to remove the government, prompted Kim to repeatedly ask the U.S. to stop these military exercises in exchange for ending North Korean nuclear and missile testing. But the U.S. has refused.

North Korea’s Aug. 28 missile test, just hours after the war games ended, was a reasoned response by a country that has experienced 64 years of demonization, sanctions and bullying.

North Korea wants negotiations, not war. They want to put this nightmare behind them. But Washington won’t let them because it likes the status quo. President Trump has agreed to sell South Korea billions of dollars in arms. If one’s product is weapons, one’s market is war. Washington wants to be a permanent fixture in South Korea and expand its geopolitical grip with little regard for the risk of nuclear Armageddon. That’s why this crisis continues to boil.

Harold A. Penner
Akron, Pa.