Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) said North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un was not going to give up his nuclear weapons because he didn’t see that “credible message” coming from President Donald Trump.
Gabbard said, “It’s not just the president making a decision to launch a nuclear weapon, it’s these kinds of mistakes that we have seen happen in the past, that bring us to this brink of nuclear war, that could be unintentional. And that’s really what is at stake here for the people of Hawaii. What makes me angry, yes, that this false alarm went out, and we have to fix that in Hawaii, but really, we’ve got to get to the underlying issue here of, why are the people of Hawaii and this country facing a nuclear threat coming from North Korea today and what is this president doing urgently to eliminate that threat?
Tapper asked, “You’ve said that he’s taking too long to deal with this and he’s not taking the threat from North Korea seriously. What do you want President Trump to be doing?
Gabbard continued, “Well, I’ve been talking about the seriousness of this threat for years since I’ve came here to Congress. And I’ve been calling on President Trump to directly negotiate with North Korea, to sit across the table from Kim Jong-un, work out the differences so that we can build a pathway towards denuclearization, to remove this threat.”
She added, “There’s a few things that have to happen in order for those negotiations to be successful. First of all, they have to happen without preconditions. And this has been a learned lesson from the decades of that the people of Hawaii are paying the price for now, where they set these unrealistic preconditions, for example, saying North Korea, we’re only going to talk to you if you first get rid of your nuclear weapons. What would be the point of having a conversation if they get rid of their nuclear weapons? There would be nothing to talk about at that point.”
“But the second issue is understanding why North Korea has developed and is holding on so tightly to these nuclear weapons because they see it as the only deterrent against the U.S. coming in and overthrowing their regime there,” she added. “So, that exists as a result, again, of our decades-long regime change or policies around the world that North Korea is now in a position where Kim Jong-un is saying, ‘No way, I’m not going to give up these nuclear weapons,’ because he doesn’t see that credible message coming from the United States that we don’t — we’re not interested in overthrowing your government. We’re interested in removing this nuclear threat from our country in the world.”
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