Crosstalk: August 11, 2017

​Alex Newman is an international freelance journalist, educator and consultant. His articles frequently appear in The New American. He's the co-author of the book, 'Crimes of the Educators'.

What's behind the tensions between the U.S. and North Korea? Jim mentioned a Washington Post article that blames former President Ronald Reagan for this. They alluded to Reagan's directives in Grenada in 1983 that caused the Kim dynasty to pursue a nuclear weapons program so that they could be protected from nations like the U.S.

Alex feels that accusation is ludicrous. He believes that if you go back to the Korean War you see that it never officially ended yet the communist nation has vowed to take over the entire peninsula.

Looking deeper, is Kim Jong-Un of North Korea really a rogue leader of a nation all alone by itself, or is there more to the story? According to Alex, Kim Jong- Un has allies across Africa and Latin America, but North Korea's most powerful alliance is with their ideological allies in Beijing. He admitted that the Chinese leadership behaves a bit differently, with Beijing at least trying to look like a respectable actor on the international stage, including being involved in important U.N. agencies. The problem is that some of those agencies, right this moment, are involved in helping the North Koreans.

The North Koreans are best seen as an extension of the communist Chinese party which itself is an extension of the international communist movement. There's the impression that when the Soviet Union collapsed, suddenly the entire international communist conspiracy went with it. That simply isn't true. For example, there's still an active, international communist movement that has a powerful influence in Moscow. Many defectors have talked about this. They control China, Vietnam, Cuba and Laos. Look behind the scenes and you see they wield tremendous power in other places of the world as well including Africa along with the power they carry in the U.N. Granted, Kim Jong-Un is a small, visible piece of this puzzle, but he represents, as Alex put it, 'one symptom of a festering disease'.

Where did they get their military technology? Alex explained how the North Koreans, the Chinese and the Soviets received military technology as a direct result of the actions of influential people within the U.S.

Alex took listeners back to the days of Joseph Stalin who was a close ally of the United States. In fact, we were building factories in the Soviet Union so that they could build their own tanks, military trucks and planes. We have evidence showing that elements within the U.S. government helped Stalin acquire nuclear weapons.

Then there was the Chinagate scandal under the Clinton administration. In exchange for illegal campaign contributions from the communist Chinese dictatorship, the Clinton administration gave the Chinese access to some of our most sensitive military technology including nuclear secrets.

Much of this technology was transferred to the North Koreans through the Chinese. On top of that, the U.N. development organization has been building factories around Pyongyang, including semiconductor and microchip factories, and the North Koreans use these to build the electronic components for its submarines, missiles and other weapons of war.

Perhaps even more surprising is that the U.S. government actually built nuclear reactors for North Korea in 1994 as part of an agreement. They were built with the thought that they already had nuclear reactors and the one's we'd build for them would be different and that would prevent them from weaponizing uranium and plutonium. The problem is that there was no guarantee that those reactors could be made 'tamper-proof' in such a way that this would never happen.
This is the background history that has brought our nation to this point. Jim had Alex present much more such as looking at the current threat possibilities; how war, or the threat of it, could cause people to be more accepting of a U.N. controlled world, how this topic affects the persecution of Christians, and is Kim Jong-Un actually willing to announce intended targets as he seemingly has done regarding Guam.