In the days since the president’s extemporaneous “fire and fury” comments about American willingness to annihilate North Korea if it so much as issued threats against this country, North Korea has. . . issued threats against this country. Donald Trump, in turn, has continued to employ incendiary language against the communist nation. He’s averred that his “fire and fury” comments may not have been strong enough, and has indicated that the U.S. military is “locked and loaded” to take action.
The most positive spin on the president’s behavior is that Donald Trump is trying to bluster North Korea into backing off its nuclear program; but the risks of this strategy paint it in an overwhelmingly dangerous light. The idea that a president thinks that he should conduct nuclear diplomacy via impromptu remarks is chilling. And he recklessly ignores or downplays the possibility that the North Koreans might take his belligerence as an indication of an impending U.S. attack, which could plausibly lead to the North Koreans shooting first, with horrendous consequences for its Asian neighbors, and possibly the U.S. as well.
Likewise, we can take no comfort in the possibility (to give him a generous benefit of the doubt) that the president may have put great care into his nuclear-themed tweets before sending them, for the overwhelming reason that it would be grossly incompetent for any president to conduct nuclear diplomacy via tweet to begin with. With their imprecision, ambiguity through brevity, and unvetted messaging, the president’s use of tweets puts the fate of the world into the hands of his literal hands, the early-morning scamper of ornery fingers over his smart phone of choice. It is an indication of how much this president has lowered our collective expectations that this fundamentally incompetent choice for communicating thermonuclear messages isn’t a subject of greater outrage.
While the president has been on his belligerent tear, White House advisors have issued mixed messages about U.S. intentions, from Defense Secretary James Mattis echoing Trump’s general sentiment that the U.S. could destroy North Korea if it chose, to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson trying to assure people that there’s nothing to worry about and that Americans should sleep soundly. This offers no comfort that either this president or his administration as a whole has a strategy for defusing the North Korean crisis.
But is there even a North Korean crisis? North Korea has been working towards acquiring nuclear capabilities and the ability to threaten the U.S. with those capabilities for decades now. A corner has surely been turned as they near achievement of ballistic missiles that can strike the continental U.S. Yet the U.S. has relied on the principle of deterrence in its dealings with other nuclear powers throughout the nuclear age: the idea that any nuclear strike on the U.S. would receive a response in kind, making the price for initiating an attack too high for an adversary to contemplate. So why is the North Korea situation any different? Well, as Jeet Heer explains in the New Republic this week, it may be better to ask ourselves if we have a Trump crisis rather than a North Korea crisis, as he argues that the stand-off with North Korea is stable, whereas our president is not.
When you enter the rabbit’s hole of possible hostilities with North Korea, you quickly reach a few conclusions. The first is that a preemptive attack against North Korea is madness, because it runs the risk of provoking a nuclear response from North Korea, if not against the U.S., then against other countries in Asia. Even in the extremely unlikely possibility that a U.S. attack were able to eliminate every last nuclear weapon they possess, the North Koreans have thousands of conventional weapons, including artillery, with which they could inflict mass casualties on South Korea, including the capital city of Seoul, which lies close to the north-south border.
And this is just to speak of a conventional U.S. attack on North Korea. For the U.S. to use nuclear weapons in a preemptive attack would upend our world in terrifying ways. Nuclear weapons have not been used since the end of World War II. Use of them now would eliminate a taboo that has helped keep our world safe for the last 70 years. It is not hard to see other nuclear powers like Russia, China, or India feeling emboldened to use them. U.S. first-use of nuclear weapons would mean sanctioning mass murder as a legitimate tool of war. For at the heart of things, nuclear weapons, in their total indiscriminacy and inevitable civilian casualties, are completely immoral. They are a tool of terror, and their very existence is an affront to our shared humanity. Even nuclear deterrence, the basis of our country’s nuclear strategy, shares this immorality; though it may keep the peace, it does so through the notion of terror, and the threat of mass murder.
So it shouldn’t be a surprise that a president who has made violence towards various groups in our country a key part of his appeal and persona should feel deeply attracted to the power of nuclear weapons, with all the terrorizing potential they embody. Whether or not he consciously realizes the fully horrifying implications of this fact, there seems a very real possibility that the president’s recent tough talk on North Korea is intended only partly or incidentally for North Korea’s leaders, and more to show his supporters how tough he is. This New York Times piece explores the supportive reaction many conservatives have had to Trump’s rhetoric. In their commentary, you can also get a sense of the ignorance and derangement of many Americans in matters of war and peace. They speak casually about death and destruction; evince a lack of worry because the state they happen to be living in is too far inland to be hit by Korean nukes; and view North Korea as some sort of existential threat to themselves, personally. Paranoid and bloodthirsty, they indeed seem well-matched to this president's disposition.
Finally, it's vitally important not to separate Trump's mishandling of the North Korea situation from the downward spiral of his entire presidency. His belligerence towards North Korea is likely related to that fact, as he seeks to distract us from his incompetence in so many other arenas. War is always the last refuge of political scoundrels, and Trump is the biggest political scoundrel of our time.
