A giant step for peace

 Democratic Korean leader Kim Jong Un took a giant step towards ending the tension on the Korean peninsula when he met Donald Trump, the leader of US imperialism this week. By all accounts Chairman Kim and President Trump made considerable progress at their ground-breaking talks in Singapore this week.

Both sides agreed to work towards the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula and the American leader later told the media that he has halted the US-south Korean war-games that have plagued the peninsula for decades and talked about the eventual withdrawal of all American troops from south Korea.

The Trump administration should fully support the realistic circles now in power in south Korea who are working towards rapprochement with the north. Economic sanctions against the DPRK must be dropped and the Americans must normalise relations with the country that is still, technically, at war with the United States.

Sixteen years ago the DPRK was branded by US imperialism as part of the “axis of evil”. Countries that had dared to stand up to American imperialism, in one form or another, were marked down for “regime change” –which soon happened in Iraq and Libya.

The Americans, with the shameful support of British imperialism, brought death and destruction to Iraq and Libya. The Iraqi leader was hanged and Muammar Gaddafi was beaten to death by a sectarian mob armed and funded by the United States and its NATO allies. Neither country possessed the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that the Americans claimed they held.

Trump began threatening north Korea as soon as he stepped into the White House demanding that the DPRK abandon its nuclear deterrent while offering nothing in return. Last August the Americans forced the UN Security Council to rubber-stamp more sanctions while Trump raged that Democratic Korea would face “fire and fury ... the likes of which the world has never seen” if it did not do the bidding of US imperialism.

But in the DPRK everyone knows the fate of countries like Libya and Iraq, which disarmed under the mistaken belief that this would spare them from the horrors of imperialist invasion and regime change. No one in the DPRK took any notice of threats coming from the imperialists who devastated the country in an attempt to overthrow the people’s government during the Korean War. Korean leader Kim Jong Un, following in the footsteps of his revolutionary predecessors, maintained the country’s nuclear research programme to develop the ballistic missile defence system and an independent nuclear deterrent that successfully staved off American aggression.

The struggling peoples of the world have learnt the lessons of Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya, who were powerless to resist the might of US-led imperialism, whilst genuine communists have been heartened by the determined steps taken by the people’s government in north Korea to defend the sovereignty of the DPRK that finally forced the Americans to the negotiating table.

Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump took a giant step for peace when they met in the Republic of Singapore this week. Both leaders have agreed to meet again face-to-face in Washington and Pyongyang to improve relations between the USA and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, whose leaders’ have worked tirelessly for the peaceful reunification of Korea since the end of the Korean War in 1953. But much more work needs to be done, largely by the American side, to maintain the momentum for peace.