For over a year in the West, the finger has been pointed at North Korea, which is guilty of ‘selling arms and bullets to Russia in its war against Ukraine’[1] . On 6 January, Mychajlo Podolyak, advisor to President Zelensky, denounced that ‘Russia has for the first time struck the territory of Ukraine with missiles received from North Korea’[2] . And a few hours ago, South Korea’s very recent accusation against North Korea of also selling weapons to Hamas[3] was added.

However, no one explains that it was US President George Bush Jr. who tore up his predecessor Bill Clinton’s peace plan between the US and North Korea. We have no sympathy for regimes like North Korea’s and for people like its current president. But it is absurd that no one explains how the current dangerous US/North Korea situation and its annexes are consequences of the ‘grand refusal’ that the newly elected President George Bush son opposed to the peace plan agreed in October 2000 by his predecessor Clinton with the then North Korean President Kim Jong-il, father of the current President Kim Jong-un. To meet the North Korean summit to prepare the signing of the agreement Clinton sent Secretary of State Mrs. Magdalene Albright, who brought as a gift to Kim[4] a basketball autographed by champion Michael Jordan, of whom Kim was a huge fan.

What happened next is not written in newspapers or told on television, but only recounted – in great detail – in the book ‘Inventing the Axis of Evil – The Truth about Iran, Syria and North Korea’[5] . Let us try to summarise what concerns the third country.

In October 2000, before the US elections on 7 November that brought George W. Bush to the White House, General Jo Myong Rok, i.e. North Korea’s most powerful authority, the man who presided over the complex that manufactured and sold missiles to other countries, was in the US from the 9th to the 12th and visited Bill Clinton at the White House, in the presence of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Secretary of Defence William Cohen. On the occasion, a joint commitment was written to the effect that ‘neither government wants to have hostile intentions towards the other’. The joint communiqué of 12 October noted that the resolution of the missile dispute ‘will essentially contribute to radically improved relations’ and reaffirmed the two countries’ commitment to the implementation of the framework agreed in 1994, the one that convinced Pyongyang to halt its nuclear weapons programmes. The communiqué contained the announcement that Madeleine Albright would visit North Korea to prepare for Clinton’s visit, especially in case Al Gore, the Democrats’ candidate and Clinton’s vice-president, was elected president.

In fact, the US Secretary of State travelled to Pyongyang from 24 to 26 October to meet directly with Kim and finalise what he had started to negotiate with Rok at the White House to finally normalise relations with the US, as well as to prepare the agenda for the summit in Pyongyang itself between Clinton and Kim. The summit was expected to end with the signing of an agreement for the US to purchase all existing intermediate- and long-range missiles from North Korea. North Korea, in turn, would also have undertaken to put its artificial telecommunication satellites into orbit not with its own missiles, which it would no longer produce, but with Russian ones specially requested from President Putin.

Until then, North Korea had conducted a single test with the Taepo Dong-1 medium-range ballistic missile in August 1998 in an attempt to put a satellite into orbit. And in September the following year, it had decided on a moratorium on missile tests to facilitate dialogue with the US. Albright described her talks with Kim as ‘serious, constructive and thorough’ and said that Assistant Secretary of State Robert Einhorn would meet with the North Koreans in Kuala Lumpur on 1 November to find a solution to the missile problem with them. In short, the much deprecated North Korea and its even more deprecated president would unequivocally renounce their missile and nuclear programmes.

Blocking the march towards the end of hostilities initiated by Clinton and Kim Sr. was the unexpected electoral victory – narrowly defeated and also suspected of fraud – of the Republican candidate Bush instead of the Democrat Al Gore a few days later, on 7 November. Having taken office in the White House on 10 January 2001, Bush had already in March treated South Korea’s president, Kim Dae Jung, freshly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and eager for agreements and reconciliation with the North, with a stern hand. Bush also silenced Colin Powell, guilty of daring to say that the new administration would ‘continue negotiations with North Korea where the Clinton administration left off’.

The then Italian Foreign Minister Lamberto Dini had also flown to Pyongyang at the suggestion of the US and here is what he recalled in April 2017 talking to the online magazine Linkiesta[6] : “Bill Clinton’s official visit to North Korea had been scheduled for the following December. Too bad that in November the US Democratic Party lost the elections. And George Bush Jr, as newly elected president, prevented that trip’. Linkiesta adds that it was ‘the end of the great diplomatic project led by Italy. In a short time Bush inaugurated the policy of ‘rogue states’. The rest is recent history. Dini concluded his interview with the following words: ‘And so all attempts to convince North Korea to abandon its arms race and nuclear tests have failed’.

It should be noted that if Bush called the North Korean state rogue, Donald Trump in September 2017 did even worse: in a tweet of his own, he called the entire nation rogue[7] , i.e. the more than 24 million North Koreans en bloc: ‘North Korea is a rogue nation, becoming a major threat and embarrassment to China’. Some even speculated about an attempt by China to overthrow[8] the North Korean regime.

Let us now return to the present day, the beginning of the year 2024. Not to be outdone by Bush son and Trump, the Ukrainian Podolyak, who is also a journalist, declared in recent days that Russia, Iran, North Korea constitute the Axis of Evil[9] . There is, however, also something extremely dishonest in hiding the fact that President Clinton and the then president of North Korea had reached an agreement on missile disarmament and the renunciation of military nuclear power by the small Asian country, but that, as we have seen, it was George Bush son, president of the USA and not of North Korea, who took it down.

The continuing bad and dangerous tension between the US and North Korea and the sales of arms and bullets to Russia and Hamas are therefore, if true, the offspring of Bush’s son because it was he who sank the US/North Korea dialogue. And since then, no one in the White House, not even Obama, has wanted to salvage that dialogue by relaunching the agreement found by Clinton. On the contrary, Obama approved the programme that in 30 years will spend the absurd sum of $1 trillion on new nuclear weapons. And Trump, as soon as he set foot in the White House, confirmed and enhanced that programme with investments in other weapons as well.

JPN029

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[1] https://www.repubblica.it/esteri/2022/09/06/news/russia_armi_munizioni_corea_del_nord_titolo-364397630/

[2] https://notizieinlinea.online/guerra-ucraina-russia-le-news-di-oggi-125/

[3] https://www.repubblica.it/esteri/2024/01/08/diretta/israele_hamas_gaza_news_guerra_oggi-421826984/?ref=RHLF-BG-P13-S2-T1

[4] https://www.tempi.it/da-michael-jordan-a-dennis-rodman-la-smodata-passione-dei-dittatori-nordcoreani-drogati-di-nba/

[5] https://www.ibs.it/inventare-asse-del-male-verita-libro-vari/e/9788889091265

[6] https://www.linkiesta.it/it/article/2017/04/21/quando-gli-amici-della-corea-del-nord-eravamo-noi/33933/

[7] https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/904307898213433344

[8] https://www.corriere.it/esteri/17_settembre_04/quando-pechino-provo-rovesciare-dittatore-l-origine-grande-crisi-ff921300-90e5-11e7-8eb0-0c961f9191ec.shtml

[9] https://www.quotidiano.net/ultimaora/mosca-usa-missili-nordcoreani-kiev-non-ha-dubbi-d89fadf1