Under North Korea’s nuclear threat, the world needs another Churchill

It is clear that a moment of truth in Donald Trump’s presidency is at the gate. He is the first American president confronted with a North Korea capable of launching an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) at the United States.

The evil Pyongyang regime’s bombast and technological ability is not unique. The list of customers seeking missiles, the latest weapons of mass destruction, and deadly poison gas fine-tuned by using prisoners as human Guinea pigs, is a virtual “who’s who” of tyrants over the last half century. Experts suspect that even the theocracy in Iran, for example, has never blinked from working hand-in-hand with the atheistic regime in Pyongyang as each seeks the ultimate power of a deliverable nuclear weapon atop an intercontinental missile.

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— The Hill (@thehill) July 10, 2017

For decades the world has stood by and done effectively nothing about North Korea but pass increasingly meaningless resolutions of warning and condemnation. The United States has tried everything from playing Mr. Nice Guy with an appeasement policy to cutting off food aid. Good cop or bad, it made no difference. The Kims, neither father nor son, weren’t dealing. So far, President Trump has tried mightily to get the one actor with significant leverage — Beijing — to intervene but they appear to be unwilling to go beyond Swiss cheese sanctions.

{mosads}So what’s a leader to do when he is warned by friend and foe alike that dealing with this threat could be messy and very bloody? A leader should do what Winston Churchill did, about a year and a half after Hitler was named chancellor: He told them the truth. In a speech delivered in the House of Commons in November 1934, and repeated later that night on the BBC, he told them:

“After all, my friends, only a few hours away by air there dwell a nation of nearly 70 millions …. who are being taught from childhood to think of war as a glorious exercise and death in battle as the noblest fate for man.

“There is a nation which has abandoned all its liberties … in the grip of a group of ruthless men, preaching a gospel of intolerance and racial pride, unrestrained by law, by parliament, or by public opinion. In that country … From their new table of commandments they have omitted ‘thou shall not kill.’

“Now they are rearming with the utmost speed and ready to their hands is this new lamentable weapon of the air against which … there is no defense before which women and children, the weak and frail … lie in equal … peril.

“Now, these are facts, hard, grim, indisputable facts, and in the face of these facts, I ask again, what are we to do?

“There are those who say, ‘Let us ignore the continent of Europe. Let us leave it with its hatreds and its armaments, to stew in its own juice, to fight out its own quarrels, and decree its own doom. Let us turn our backs to this melancholy and alarmist view. Let us fix our gaze across the ocean and see our own life in our own dominions and empires.’

“There would be very much to this plan if only we could unfasten the British islands from their rock foundations, and could tow them 3,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean, and anchor them safely upon the smiling coasts of Canada; but I have not yet heard of any way in which this could be done.”

As with most prophets, Churchill’s warnings to confront the burgeoning threat and growing power of an evil regime fell on deaf ears. With his 1939 attack on Poland, Hitler launched WWII, history’s bloodiest conflict. It would take six years from the time Churchill delivered the speech quoted above before a desperate nation finally turned to Churchill to lead them in battle to save England and Western Civilization.

US fails to convince China and Russia to denounce North Korea missile test at United Nations https://t.co/hlkIOhuOLp pic.twitter.com/IQEH856qC4

— The Hill (@thehill) July 7, 2017

No one knows how many of the 55 million people who were killed in World War II would have been saved if Germany’s neighbors had the guts in the 1930s to take Hitler’s genocidal threats seriously. But until the outbreak of World War II, there were too many Neville Chamberlains and not enough Churchills.

In 2017, it is difficult and discomfiting for most people to acknowledge the depth of evil that is Kim Jong Un’s regime. He had his half-brother murdered; his uncle was reportedly executed by an anti-aircraft gun unleashed at point-blank range. North Korea today is all about slave labor, a gulag, continuous development of weapons of mass destruction and, most of all, the constant broadcast of their leader’s threats to destroy his enemies.

One uncomfortable truth that the Jewish people learned the hard way from the Holocaust is to take every tyrant’s threat seriously. That is why Israel took out Saddam Hussein’s nuclear facility in Iraq, and why Jerusalem did the same to the nuclear facility being built for President Assad in Syria, possibly with the aid of North Korea.

Kicking the ball down the field again to leave North Korea to the next president is a prescription for disaster. The time has come for the civilized world to join the U.S. in taking all necessary measures to remove Kim Jong Un’s looming ability to threaten the world with a nuclear holocaust.

The world will become a safer place only if President Trump and his allies look to the Churchill bust, now back in the Oval Office, for inspiration and guidance.

Rabbi Marvin Hier is the Dean and Founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Rabbi Abraham Cooper is the Center’s Associate Dean and long time advocate for human rights in North Korea.

The views expressed by contributors are their own ad are not the views of The Hill.