Paul advocates ‘the third option’; withdraw from South Korea, offer the North Korean friendship and stop giving them any more money or aid.
“I mean, they can’t even feed themselves. They do not have a Navy, what kind of an Air Force do they have, and yet it just seems like this is an excuse for the West, and in particular our military-industrial complex to have another excuse to have a massive build up… It just seems so unnecessary. Ironically, it seems like the Chinese had the most measured response as they, “why don’t you just sit back a minute and think about this?” And I think that is what we ought to do.
The Koreans are not going to attack us. If they even did have a bomb, even if they made an attempt to do it, I mean, they would be wiped off on the face of the Earth within minutes.
It is just preposterous to think that the North Koreans are a threat. I think they are playing cat and mouse. I think they are laughing. I think they love to see us go nuts over this, but what they don’t understand is, they might not realize how much we might overreact, and this whole thing that some of our politicians are saying, “Well, we should have gone in there and bombed that site before the rocket even took off.”
Quite frankly, I think if we would not be in South Korea, which I have advocated for years, South Korea and North Korea probably would be unified and they would be westernized by now…
People are now crying for even more and more sanctions. So it just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever for us to pursue these policies of antagonism. You say these people are a bit nuts. Well, if they don’t want to talk to us, fine. But if they would talk to us, I would not give them any money. So often when we talk to the North Koreans, we think they are going to do something, we give them money. Why don’t we try this third option? Instead of either attacking people or giving them money, just offer out friendship. If they want to trade with us, fine. But communism fails, it will fail, their system is failing. The Soviet system, we didn’t have to attack it. They had thousands and thousands of nuclear weapons, and we didn’t have to confront them.”
May 4, 2009: Ron Paul, Campaign For Liberty
