It’s one thing to be convinced, based on the endless evidence presented during the painfully long 2016 primaries and campaign, of Donald Trump’s fundamental unfitness for the presidency. It’s another, more chilling thing to daily contemplate the specific areas of mortal danger over which he now has responsibility. Exhibit A among these dangers may well be North Korea’s nuclear aspirations. North Korea is surely a puzzler for many Americans: the country combines cartoonish anachronism with atomic danger, as if some distillation of the Cold War had made it to our early 21st century — which is actually true, as far as it goes.
But origins aside, the central reality is that North Korea is a country whose leadership has become convinced that the only way it can defend the regime is to possess nuclear weapons that will deter the United States from attacking it, while the United States is committed to ending North Korea’s nuclear program. And as this disturbing New York Times piece lays out, this inevitably means that the United States and North Korea are locked in an extremely dangerous conflict. Now that the United State is putting pre-emptive action “on the table,” it’s become even more dangerous. Here’s the key quote for understanding how unstable the dynamic is:
“North Korea knows it would probably lose any war. Should one occur, its plans call for a full-scale, last-ditch retaliation to stop the Americans in their tracks.
This strategy, borne of desperation, creates a risk that has long chastened American war planners: that North Korea would perceive even a limited strike as the start of a war and respond with its full arsenal.”
Here’s my question: Can Donald Trump be trusted to understand the specific danger here — that the fundamental ambiguity of what North Koreans might “perceive” as a “limited strike” means that the United States might, by miscalculation, set off a chain of events that could leave millions, most probably in Asia, dead? On the one hand, we have a paranoid, nuclear armed power willing to contemplate horrific death tolls to defend itself; on the other, we have a president whose hallmarks include casual belligerence, basic incuriosity, and no grasp of the facts in too many areas to count. This is a situation where what seems like a small misstep could foreseeably escalate into apocalyptic horror.
When I say that opposition to Donald Trump’s presidency must be rooted in ensuring his political destruction and removal from office as soon as possible, it is situations like North Korea that are uppermost in my mind. The risks are too great, and there is too high a possibility that once an immediate crisis is upon us, it would be too late to turn things around. This means that in fact a national crisis is already upon us, whether we like it or not, and one of the tasks at hand is to persuade the unconvinced that the time for full-scale opposition to Trump is now. One crucial challenge is to demystify and broadcast issues like the North Korea conundrum, and at a minimum to make sure that the public spotlight is on them, so that Donald Trump cannot so easily tweet us into nuclear war.
