President Donald Trump must stress the dangers of North Korea and urge the countries of the United Nations to come together against its threat, as the country and its leadership pose the "greatest danger of nuclear war that we have seen, not just since the Cold War," former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Monday.
"I think it's a greater danger than the Cuban Missile Crisis or other events during the Cold War," Gingrich told Fox News' "Fox & Friends" program. "There's a very real danger here that we're going to somehow end up in a nuclear exchange that will kill an enormous number of people."
Further, he said, "all the elements of the planet," including Russia and China, will have to be involved in convincing North Korea to "step down and limit their ambitions."
China, in particular, has to cut off North Korea economically, said Gingrich, but there are "a lot of games being played" by many parties.
"The North Korean economy continues to be financed by Russia and China, and I think those two countries have to understand they are risking a real war on their border if they allow this to continue," said Gingrich. "The United States is not going to tolerate a dictatorship with ICBMs with hydrogen warheads that could eliminate American cities ... no president could responsibly take the risk of somebody like Kim Jong Un, literally wiping out Seattle or Chicago or Los Angeles."
Trump will have other powerful messages when he speaks to the United Nations' General Assembly on Tuesday, said Gingrich, including about his vision of sovereignty, and the United States as a unique nation.
"He expects everybody else also to be unique nations," said Gingrich. "I think somebody who cuts through all the globalism and reasserts the legitimacy of national sovereignty is a very important step for the UN."
Secondly, the UN must reform itself, said Gingrich, as "there are too many ways in which it is incompetent and inefficient and some ways dishonest."
The United States, meanwhile, has been the "most generous country," and it is reasonable for Trump to say to the world that it must do its fair share, said Gingrich.
"We accept more illegal immigrants," said the former speaker. "We have put tens of billions of dollars into foreign aid, we put tens of billions of dollars in humanitarian aid trying to follow up after tsunamis and earthquakes. So I think it is reasonable to say to the world you have to do your fair share too."
The United States also should look seriously at its entire relationship with the UN, and decide if it should form "some kind of organization of democracies," said Gingrich.
In the UN, he continued, "you have the United States getting outvoted by disasters like Venezuela or other countries that are crashing, dictatorships like [Vladimir] Putin's government, which has been assassinating people. One of the uncovered stories of the last three or four years is how many people the Russians have assassinated, and we pretend that they're morally equal. Well, they're not."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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