Former U.S. House speaker Newt Gingrich on Monday said China faces a stark choice over North Korea. In a lecture on the U.S. national security at the Heritage Foundation, Gingrich said if the North continues its brinkmanship, China will have to choose between a nuclear-free North Korea and a nuclear-armed Japan in the not-too-distant future.
He said Tokyo will increase its military capabilities to respond to threat from North Korea and that the U.S. will give whatever support it can. The time is approaching for China to determine if Japan's establishment of a more elaborate missile defense system is really in China's interest, he said.
| There's a nice reinforcement to the quiet message Bambi should be sending ... |
But he said the Chinese government seems to believe that for the time being a divided Korean Peninsula is more in its interest and to maintain the current situation in which North Korea is rubbing the U.S. up the wrong way.
In the lecture, the hardline conservative also warned of what he claimed was the threat of an "electromagnetic pulse" attack that could knock out all electronic appliances from mainframes to the U.S. power grid. "This is a catastrophic threat waiting to happen and North Korea, China and Russia all understand it and are all working on it," he claimed. |