Argumentative Essay On North Korea

North Korea’s nuclear weapons program presents one of the most complicated problems for US policymakers and diplomats, one that has confounded multiple presidential administrations. So far, American attempts to curb North Korea’s nuclear ambitions have failed, and the North shows no signs of slowing its development of nuclear weapons. In fact, the problem is only getting worse for the US. On November 28th, 2017, North Korea conducted a ballistic missile test that demonstrated a potential range of over 8,000 miles, giving it the capability to hit any part of the continental US. Clearly, it is not in the interest of the United States to have an adversarial state capable of a nuclear strike on the US mainland. Thus far, US policy has failed

The US has committed to defending South Korea from invasion, but it is questionable whether American leaders would be willing to uphold that commitment if North Korea were able to credibly threaten US cities with nuclear attack. As stated by Andrei Lankov, an expert on North Korea at Kookmin University, Seoul, “If the Americans face a choice between San Francisco and Seoul, they will choose San Francisco.” While it may be unlikely that North Korea will attempt to reunify the Korean Peninsula by force, the ability to threaten the US with nuclear force gives the greatest chance that such an attempt will be

Trump has stated that China is “very much the economic lifeline to North Korea,” and, referring to North Korea, that “China could very easily solve this problem!” While it is true that North Korea is heavily dependent on China economically, with 90% of North Korea’s trade coming from China, China is reluctant to leverage that dependence, for fear of threatening its own vital national interest. President Trump’s apparent ignorance of the Chinese position demonstrates a failure to view the issue of North Korea through the Chinese perspective, which has thus far led to a failure by the Trump administration to curb North Korea’s nuclear