"North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen ... he has been very threatening beyond a normal state. They will be met with fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before.”
In trying to sound like a sheriff out of a Western from his childhood (“best not make any more threats”), Donald Trump appears to have become the first president in U.S. history to threaten nuclear annihilation in response not to an attack from another country, but in response to another country simply threatening the United States (a bluff already called by North Korea, which has subsequently put out statements about firing missiles around the island of Guam). It’s the Bush-era pre-emptive doctrine gone apocalyptic, uttered extemporaneously by a man who also appears to have adopted the grandiose language (“fire and fury”) of his North Korean antagonists. And if I were to get a little speculative, I would hazard that they were the words of a profoundly insecure man who suddenly finds himself at the helm of a vast nuclear arsenal, the very power of which lies in its ability to blast and contaminate all life on our planet: godlike, inhuman, incomprehensible. This sense is supported by his tweets the next morning about U.S. nuclear capabilities, which seemed to reinforce the idea that he’s become enamored of American death-dealing capabilities.
Will Trump’s belligerence stumble us into nuclear war, or will his generals restrain him, as so many commentators keep insisting? Senator Lindsey Graham’s remarks last week on NBC’s Today show are not reassuring. Noting that there’s a “military option to destroy North Korea's [missile] program and North Korea itself,” he went on to say, “If there's going to be a war to stop them, it will be over there. If thousands die, they're going to die over there, they're not going to die here and (President Donald Trump) told me that to my face.” Let that last sentence sink in for a few moments. Donald Trump is already contemplating the idea of a nuclear war against North Korea, and has reached the conclusion that the casualties would be confined to Asia. My fear is that to a damaged personality like Trump’s, a sense of being able to externalize the damage of a nuclear war away from the United States puts it in the realm of something he might actually contemplate starting.
As I’ve said before, Donald Trump is Exhibit Number 1 in the argument for ridding the world of nuclear weapons. There has always been the possibility of a nuclear war happening through chance or miscalculation, or of course through the acts of an irrational leader. Well, we have an irrational, unfit leader, and it’s all too easy to see how this might lead our country, and just as likely, North Korea, into miscalculations with literally genocidal consequences. And God help us if Donald Trump sees starting a war as a way to assert his power in the midst of a downward-spiraling presidency, not to mention exorcising whatever demons of insufficiency have driven him to bully and cheat his way through life, and now into the presidency.
