Donald Trump Claims Barack Obama War With North Korea Thwarted By 2016 Election
Donald Trump has claimed that if he was not elected the 44th President of the United States, there would have been a major conflict between the U.S and North Korea.
During a press conference held on Wednesday, Trump claimed that former President Barack Obama nearly started a catastrophic war with North Korea.
Trump told reporters that his predecessor was close to “pressing the trigger,” which would have killed millions of people in what could have been another world war.
This is not the first time that the president implied the previous administration was on the verge of war.
During an interview with FOX News host Steve Doocy just a week after his unprecedented meeting with North Korea leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore last June, Trump claimed that Obama directly told him about being essentially ready to go to war with North Korea.
The conversation allegedly occurred during a meeting at the oval office on Nov. 10, 2016.
Trump’s comments asserting that the Obama White House was on the precipice of starting a world war did not go well with former national security officials who have worked in the previous administration.
Ned Price, a national security council spokesperson during Obama’s term, said that the previous administration consistently believed in diplomacy.
“The Obama administration was consistently of the belief — informed by the best thinking and analysis from our intelligence community, war fighters, and diplomats — that diplomacy was the only viable option given what we knew would be catastrophic implications of a conflict on the Peninsula,” he said in an interview with CNN.
Trump’s claims about Obama and North Korea were not backed by evidence, but a newly released book by American investigative journalist Bob Woodward interestingly supports Trump’s claims.
According to The Japan Times, Woodward wrote in the Fear: Trump in the White House that Obama considered a pre-emptive strike on North Korea after the East Asian nation conducted its fifth nuclear test in Sept. 2016.
The book, which has sold more than 1.1 million copies just a week after it was released, claimed that despite the former president’s desire to avoid a war, he decided that the time had come to consider if the nuclear threat posed by North Korea could be eliminated by a military strike.
“In September 2016 Obama posed a sensitive question to his National Security Council: Was it possible to launch a pre-emptive military strike, supported by cyber attacks, on North Korea to take out their nuclear and missile programs?” the book reads.
