American Tech Billionaire Peter Thiel Tells Pompeo U.S. ‘Should Just Be Bombing’ North Korea

The United States and North Korea have been technically at war since June 1950, and although the phase of open hostilities in the Korean War concluded with an armistice in 1953 tensions have often been high. Since North Korea began development of nuclear weapons in the 1990s, and particularly since it tested its first nuclear warhead in 2006, there have been multiple calls in the U.S. and more broadly in the Western world to attack the country. U.S. President Barak Obama notably brought America very close to war with the small Northeast Asian state in 2016, but held back from doing so due to the lack of intelligence on the positions of Korean nuclear assets or its leadership which made it impossible to ensure the country was denuclearised with anything short of a full scale ground invasion. Such an invasion was expected to cost hundreds of thousands of U.S. casualties and millions of South Korean and Japanese lives - and after 2017 became effectively impossible as North Korea developed the capability to target the United States mainland with nuclear warheads. A nuclear attack on North Korea attack was considered by Washington in the first year of the Donald Trump administration, with defence Secretary James Mattis noting that the strike planned would 'incinerate a couple of million people.'

Speaking at the Nixon Seminar on Conservative Realism and National Security in April 2021, German-American tech billionaire Peter Thiel spoke to former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about the challenges to American hegemony posed by a rising China. Both were well known for their very hardline views against Beijing, with Thiel provocatively referring to China as “a weirdly autistic country” and “profoundly uncharismatic.” Digressing to mention Pyongyang, Thiel stated regarding “the North Korea problem”: “it’s like if you actually think about it rationally, we should just be bombing them or you have to stop them now.” He was critical of the approach of ignoring the country’s growing deterrence capabilities, which had received relatively little attention since 2018. While launching attacks on UN member states was illegal, the U.S. had done so on multiple occasions most recently striking Syria two months prior. Pyongyang, for its part, was seen by many experts to have emphasised a strong nuclear deterrent precisely because it needed to deter a possible Western attack as Thiel referred to — and thereby avoid the fates of Grenada, Panama, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria and many others which had all been illegally attacked and had all lacked a similar deterrent capability.