From Sputnik
It really is saying something when US President Trump's latest threat against North Korea draws a rebuke from John McCain -- America's most hawkish lawmaker.
McCain said Trump's comments about striking North Korea with "fire and fury" were not helpful in the current spiral of tensions.
Other members of the US Congress deplored Trump's reckless rhetoric, even comparing the president to the North Korean leader Kim Jung -un, who is commonly regarded as "a nut-job" by American politicians and media.
That comparison is saying something about Donald Trump's own state of mind.
Speaking before dinner this week at this private golf club in New Jersey, Trump warned North Korea that the country would "face fire and fury, the like of which the world has never seen before." Such words coming on the 72nd anniversary of the US dropping two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- killing over 200,000 people -- are grotesque.
Do American political leaders have no shame about the past criminal deeds of their country? Speaking about ordering genocide as if it's like ordering a hors d'oeuvre.
Even in the gung-ho political culture of the United States, Trump's casual belligerence and threat of annihilation caused a shock among some politicians and media. One lawmaker, New York Representative Eliot Engel, called Trump's rhetoric "unhinged."
The alarm is well founded. Given numerous threats already from the US that it is prepared to use pre-emptive military force against North Korea, the words from Trump implying a catastrophic attack worse than the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are indeed criminally reckless.
North Korea quickly responded that it was ready to carry out a preemptive attack on the US airbase on the Pacific island of Guam, which would "envelope it in fire." Pyongyang uses this kind of melodramatic rhetoric all the time, regularly threatening to turn the US and its allies in South Korea and Japan into "a sea of fire."
But now, even more alarmingly, we have the American Commander-in-Chief indulging in a treacherous spiral of warmongering threats, where one misstep, one misunderstanding, could launch a nuclear war in the region.
Russia and China have both called for calm and for dialogue to resolve the long-running conflict on the Korean Peninsula, which has seen recurring tensions ever since the end of the Korean War in 1953.
However, Russia and China bear a measure of responsibility for the latest flare-up. Both countries supported US calls last weekend to pile on more economic sanctions against North Korea, when they voted unanimously at the Security Council. Those sanctions were imposed in response to North Korea's defiance of previous resolutions banning the testing of ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads. Last month, North Korea launched two intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), which many analysts believe are capable of hitting the US mainland.
Russia and China have both called for calm and for dialogue to resolve the long-running conflict on the Korean Peninsula, which has seen recurring tensions ever since the end of the Korean War in 1953.
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