Steve Bannon says there’s no military solution to the conflict with North Korea over its nuclear program.
Bannon gave an interview to Robert Kuttner, a journalist with the American Prospect, a liberal website, in which President Trump’s chief strategist indirectly criticized his boss’s threat to impose “fire and fury” on North Korea.
“There’s no military solution [to North Korea’s nuclear threats], forget it,” Bannon said in the interview, which published Wednesday. “Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.”
Kuttner writes that Bannon told him Trump should consider a diplomatic deal in which China got North Korea to freeze its nuclear program, in exchange for the U.S. removing troops from the Korean Peninsula.
But he said such a deal seems remote, so Trump should not fear taking tough trade action on China, even if that would discourage Beijing from being tougher on North Korea with its nuclear program.
“To me,” Bannon said, “the economic war with China is everything. And we have to be maniacally focused on that. If we continue to lose it, we’re five years away, I think, ten years at the most, of hitting an inflection point from which we’ll never be able to recover.”
The Bannon interview comes as Trump is said to be considering firing him. Trump is reportedly resentful of Bannon’s vivid media profile, and Bannon has been accused of leaking damaging information about other White House officials, including National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster.
In a Tuesday press conference, Trump called Bannon a “good man.”
“We’ll see what happens with Mr. Bannon,” Trump said.
