Jim Webb: North Korea Crisis Is an Opportunity for China To ‘Help Us’ Secure East Asia

‘This is an opportunity for us to get a confidence-builder with China’

WEBB: "Well, they are a very opaque regime, the most opaque regime in Asia in terms of trying to understand what their decisional process is. And, as a result, you have to be prepared for, you know, unpredictable actions from them. At the same time, they should know, their military people should know that, if they really were to do something like that, they would lose badly. And we are the guarantor of stability in all of the Asian Rim. We have been since the end of World War II. I worked very hard on that, as you know, and for many, many years. And I would say, in the long term here — the short-term is, we’re going to go through a crisis, and hopefully this will not spill over, because it will be bad for them, but it will be detrimental in the region. But in the long term, this is an opportunity for us to get a confidence-builder with China. We have been having a lot of problems with China. This is an area where China has some influence, and perhaps can help us resolve a situation."

Video files
Full
Compact
Audio files
Full
Compact