Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
As President Trump (Madman Across the Water) and Supreme Leader Kim (Rocketman) engage in a battle of old Elton Jon songs, I am tremendously concerned. After reading about Trump’s speech to the United Nations this morning, it seems like KIM may be the more stable of the two leaders.
Trump seems more than willing to “think the unthinkable.” He is openly threatening not just the lives of the North Korean people, but the lives of hundreds of thousands of South Koreans, thousands of Japanese, and hundreds of thousands of US military and civilians in South Korea. It is a struggle to rationalize how the “leader of the free world” is so willing to engage in such reckless talk.
In the Cold War days it was called Nuclear Brinksmanship. The “hope” is that the US has determined a strategy of “carrot and stick,” where Trump and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley represent the stick of nuclear war, and Secretary of State Tillerson represents the carrot of peaceful resolution. And the grim reaper, General Mattis, remains poised to fulfill his duty to annihilate the nuclear capability of North Korea.
This is the “hope.” The world is aghast at our actions, as we stoop to the lowest denominator, acting as if we too were a petty dictatorship. And the “hope” is based on the premise that Kim is in the end a reasonable actor, who will value self-preservation over annihilation. From the North Korean standpoint staying alive makes perfect sense.
But that’s only if they calculate the decision in the same terms. What if the North Koreans don’t believe the “Madman Across the Water,” and instead think it really is all a bluff. What if they decide that the odds are right to call the bluff, just as Sadaam Hussein did in Iraq, claiming he had weapons of mass destruction when he did not.
Then what will the United States do? Will we engage in a war with North Korea, likely the biggest since World War II? And will this be because of North Korea’s miscalculation, or ours? And in the meantime, is this what Trump needs to distract from the looming Russia crisis?
Or will world peace, and the people of South Korea, be “like a candle in the wind?”
