McMaster says potential for war with North Korea is 'increasing every day'


National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster said Saturday the risk of war between the United States and North Korea is "increasing every day," arguing Pyongyang is "the greatest immediate threat to the United States" and "we are in a race to be able to solve this problem." He did concede there are "ways to address this problem short of armed conflict," but said there is "not much time left" for those options because of North Korea's technological progress.
In an interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, McMaster similarly argued preventive war — for the U.S. to attack North Korea to prevent the materialization of a possible future threat — may be the only option to stop "this murderous, rogue regime" from conquering South Korea and starting an Asian nuclear arms race. He brushed aside Wallace's point that the U.S. learned to coexist with a nuclear Soviet Union for decades during the Cold War, suggesting that to repeat that strategy would be too risky for U.S. security.
Watch McMaster's full Fox interview below, and read The Week's Harry J. Kazianis on the deadly consequences of McMaster's proposal. Bonnie Kristian
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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