Talk of ‘Preventive War’ Rises in White House Over North Korea
But both President Trump and his national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, have talked openly about a last-resort option if diplomacy fails
and the nuclear threat mounts: what General McMaster describes as “preventive war.”
Though the Pentagon has prepared options to pre-emptively strike North Korea’s nuclear and missile sites for more than a decade and the past four presidents declared
that “all options are on the table,” the rote phrase barely seemed credible, given the potential for a North Korean counterstrike against Seoul, South Korea, that could result in tremendous casualties in a metropolitan area of 25 million people.
But General McMaster took issue with his predecessor in the Obama administration, Susan
E. Rice, who argued in a recent Op-Ed in that preventive war would be “lunacy.”
“History shows that we can, if we must, tolerate nuclear weapons in North Korea — the same way we tolerated
the far greater threat of thousands of Soviet nuclear weapons during the Cold War,” she wrote.
“Are we preparing plans for a preventive war?” General McMaster asked recently in a television interview, defining the term as “a war
that would prevent North Korea from threatening the United States with a nuclear weapon.”
He answered his own question: “The president’s been very clear about it.
