Bannon told a reporter: “There’s no military solution, forget it.”
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It was quite surprising to see White House chief strategist Steve Bannon rule out military force so definitively in a new interview with the American Prospect ’s Robert Kuttner:
This is a pretty good summation of the problem. The prospect of a scenario that a recent Atlantic cover story by Mark Bowden called “one of the worst mass killings in human history” looms over the loose talk of a first strike against North Korea. Some argue that it’s worth risking such a scenario to prevent one in which North Korea could strike the U. S. with nuclear weapons. “If thousands die, they’ re going to die over there, ” Sen. Lindsey Graham has said. Responding to Bannon’s comments, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford acknowledged Thursday that a military solution in North Korea would be “absolutely horrific, ” but that allowing North Korea to possess nuclear-armed ballistic missiles that could threaten the U. S. was “ unimaginable .”
Joshua Keating is a staff writer at Slate focusing on international affairs.
To Bannon’s credit, the public should understand the stakes and risks involved here. (Whether they care is another question .) It’s also not that surprising that he would be opposed to military solutions. Even if it’s motivated by white nationalism and reflexive isolationism, Bannon’s skepticism about military intervention can occasionally make him sound closer to the anti-war left than to the hawks within the Republican Party and military. (See also his clashes with National Security Adviser H.
