Steve Bannon: 'There's no military solution' to North Korea

WASHINGTON - White House chief strategist Steve Bannon does not believe there is a military solution to North Korea in regards to its nuclear weapons program, The Time reported.

Bannon on Tuesday called journalist Robert Kuttner, co-founder and co-editor of left-wing publication The American Prospect, telling him to "forget" the possibility of warfare with North Korea during a wide-ranging interview.

"There’s no military solution [to North Korea’s nuclear threats], forget it," Bannon said. "Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us."

Bannon's comments appeared to contradict US President Donald Trump's comments last week in which he warned that North Korea would "be met with fire and the fury like the world has never seen" should it continue to threaten the United States.

Bannon added that the US is at "economic war with China," though he would consider a deal with China to remove American troops from the Korean peninsula in exchange for China freezing North Korea's nuclear program. But since Bannon feels such an agreement would be unlikely, he has been campaigning for the Trump administration to take a stricter stance on trade with China.

"To me, the economic war with China is everything," Bannon said. "And we have to be maniacally focused on that. If we continue to lose it, we're five years away, I think, ten years at the most, of hitting an inflection point from which we'll never be able to recover."