Aug. 18 (UPI) -- President Trump, as you sit down with President Lee Jae Myung on Aug. 25, you must not be swayed by his dangerously naive stance on "respect" for North Korea's political system. I say this not as a politician or a pundit, but as a soldier and practitioner/strategist who has spent his life confronting the nature of authoritarian regimes and understanding what it takes to resist them. President Lee's position, that South Korea should affirm "respect" for the North's totalitarian system and renounce unification by absorption, is not only strategically misguided but also morally bankrupt. It plays directly into Kim Jong Un's political warfare playbook, undermines the very purpose of the ROK/U.S. alliance, and sends a chilling message to 25 million oppressed Koreans living under tyranny.
Let's be crystal clear: North Korea (with its Workers Party of Korea) is not a legitimate political system (which is why many of us write "north" in the lower case, though our editors often correct this). It is not a state that deserves our diplomatic courtesies or rhetorical deference. It is a mafia-like crime family cult masquerading as a government. It is a totalitarian regime that has committed, and continues to commit, crimes against humanity, as documented exhaustively in the 2014 United Nations Commission of Inquiry report. These are not allegations. They are facts backed by satellite images, eyewitness testimony, and escapee accounts. We are talking about gulags, torture chambers, public executions, and enforced starvation. To "respect" such a system is to betray the Korean people in the North who suffer daily under its jackboot.
