Most of the time, a bet that Donald Trump is lying feels pretty safe. After all, there’s his insistence that he has nothing to do with Russia, except for those Russians, or those Russians, or those Russians, or those Russians, or … the other Russians. But in the case of North Korea, the stakes are so high, the big worry is that, for once, Donald Trump just might be telling the truth.
Mr. Trump’s willingness to casually threaten to annihilate a nuclear-armed foe was yet another reminder of the steep risks inherent in his brute-force approach to diplomacy. His strengths as a politician — the ability to appeal in a visceral way to the impulses of ordinary citizens — are a difficult fit for the meticulous calculations that his own advisers concede are crucial in dealing with Pyongyang.
Please note that the New York Times is still conflating the phrase “ordinary citizens” with people who think a “wife-beater” is both high couture and a personal calling. Americans who think not using nuclear weapons is a good idea are apparently excluded from being “ordinary.”
His new chief of staff and his national security team have drawn a line at trying to rein in his more incendiary provocations, fearing that their efforts could backfire with a president who bridles at any effort to control him. What remains unclear — and the source of much of the anxiety in and out of the government and on both sides of the Pacific — is whether they would step in to prevent the president from taking the kind of drastic action that matches his words, if they believed it was imminent.
General Mattis and General Kelly have agreed there’s no use trying to stop Donald Trump from pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Hoping that they’ll actually step in when Trump decides to jump does not seem like the most encouraging plan. Especially when it seems that North Korea is taking Trump seriously.
North Korea's Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho on Monday accused US President Donald Trump of declaring war on his country by tweeting over the weekend that North Korea "won't be around much longer."
Both Trump and Sarah Hucakbee Sanders have repeatedly talked up Trump’s theory that when someone insults him, he “hits back harder.” Incredibly, they both seem to think this inability to take an insult without blowing a cog is a good thing. The problem with Trump and North Korea is that his own personality is too like that of Kim Jong Un. When you have two people who both want to be seen as god-kings, and are both secretly aware they’re far less than adequate, the by-play can be toxic.
Veterans of diplomacy and national security and specialists on North Korea fear that, whatever their intended result, Mr. Trump’s increasingly bellicose threats and public insults of the famously thin-skinned Mr. Kim could cause the United States to careen into a nuclear confrontation driven by personal animosity and bravado.
North Korea’s latest backhanded reply to Trump’s overhead smash is to threaten shooting down the American bombers that the US is flying over the region as a “show of strength.”
"Since the United States declared war on our country, we will have every right to make all self-defensive counter measures, including the right to shoot down the United States strategic bombers at any time even when they are not yet inside the aerospace border of our country," Ri said.
Launching into a war with North Korea might, possibly, have the benefit of removing nuclear weapons from the peninsula. Of course, it might do so by exploding those weapons at various locations around the world at the end of rocket plumes. At this point, even if every one of North Korea’s press-releases were true, they could field only a small number of warheads and missiles. Almost all of which could almost certainly be brought down. But that’s a horrible, horrible risk to take. And the chances of taking out North Korea’s heavily fortified conventional forces before, at the very least, hundreds of thousands of people in South Korea are killed, seems remote.
It’s also worth noting that an attack on North Korea would kill a lot of people in North Korea. People who have been lied to about the state of the world for multiple generations. People who have been informed since birth that they are the last tiny holdout against a massive world power out to crush them. People whose participation in the military is not optional and whose allegiance to the state is enforced at rifle point.
Kim Jong Un isn’t just a madman with a missile. He’s a madman with a missile and 25 million hostages in his human shield.
While his bombast may be a thrill to Mr. Trump’s core supporters, there is evidence that the broader American public does not trust the president to deal with North Korea, and is deeply opposed to the kind of pre-emptive military strike he has seemed eager to threaten.
Yes, please. The non-ordinary citizens of America don’t just want to live, they’d like to avoid wiping out millions of other people. No matter what it would do for Trump’s ratings.