That’s because an intelligence insider says he’s been told by no less than CIA Director Mike Pompeo himself that war with North Korea is very likely within the first three months of 2018.
Insider James Rickards, who has worked with the U.S. intelligence community for decades, is an expert in escalation scenarios and end games. Writing in The Daily Reckoning, he said that the geopolitical situation with North Korea will soon come to a head.
Rather than the stock market, bitcoin, gold and Federal Reserve interest rate decisions, Rickards said that the most pressing global concern for the U.S. and other great powers is the escalating situation on the Korean peninsula.
“The most important financial or geopolitical issue in the world today is a coming war between the U.S. and North Korea, probably in the next twelve weeks,” he wrote.
“How can I be so sure about the timing? The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency told me,” he continued.
Rickards said that Pompeo was speaking to a private gathering in Washington, D.C., Oct. 20, when he told a small think tank group that it would not be prudent to assume that North Korea needs more than “five months” to build and deploy a reliable arsenal of nuclear-tipped ICBMs, which could be used to strike a number of American cities and kill millions of people.
“Five months from October 20, 2017 is March 20, 2018,” Rickards wrote. “That’s an outside date but the war will likely begin before then.”
The time frame creates “an element of surprise” that Pyongyang could not anticipate while avoiding a quicker-than-expected deployment of North Korea's nuclear weapons by leader Kim Jong-un.
And while the U.S., Russia and, to a far lesser extent China and India, lived through the Cold War under the MAD (mutually assured destruction) principle, that doesn’t apply with North Korea. Rickards said that President Trump’s national security advisor, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who was at the same conclave, said that the White House finds the concept of North Korea having nuclear capability “unacceptable.”
So, the goal is and always has been to stop Pyongyang from developing a viable nuclear threat in the first place, instead of learning to live with it and relying on a mutual-destruction threat that Kim may not be as concerned about.
“The reasons for this are many,” Rickards wrote. “None of the other nuclear-armed powers ever threatened to attack the United States unless attacked first.
“North Korea has threatened to attack and destroy the U.S. many times,” he continued. “The best approach for dealing with threats from dictators is to take them at their word.”
There is additional evidence that Rickards may be right.
As The National Sentinel reported last week, the Marine Corps’ top commander, Gen. Robert Neller, warned a small group of Marines in Norway that a “big-ass fight” is on the horizon.
"I hope I’m wrong, but there’s a war coming ... ," Neller said. "You’re in a fight here, an informational fight, a political fight, by your presence."
He was thought to be referring to Russia, given that the personnel he was addressing were conducting military exercises in a European country. But they could also be construed to mean a war anywhere in the world.
In fact, he referenced "the Pacific region," an area of the globe that could be a reference to China — North Korea — or both.
His comments were followed by others from Defense Secretary James Mattis, who said late last week that “storm clouds are gathering” over the Korean peninsula.
Added Rickards, “When Kim Jong Un says he will attack the United States with nuclear weapons, it is reckless to believe otherwise.”
North Korea has threatened an EMP attack in the past as well, which would devastate the U.S. power grid.
J.D. Heyes is also editor-in-chief of The National Sentinel.
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