Paying attention to what’s going on between the United States and North and South Korea is well worth the effort, even at this point of news supersaturation. It’s not just the high stakes of nuclear confrontation that show in the starkest way possible the incompetence and danger of Donald Trump’s presidency; what’s happening on the Korean Peninsula also reveals broader themes of American blindness to the world that go well beyond this particular misfit administration.
Perhaps surprisingly to many Americans, given the rhetoric of war that we’ve heard so recently from Trump administration officials, the Olympics in Pyeongchang have been accompanied by signs of a diplomatic thaw between the two Koreas. The rhetoric from the White House has been dismissive of this development, but the administration's attitude may actually reveal the degree to which the United States has lost its way in its relationship with both countries. In his most recent piece, New Republic columnist Jeet Heer brings us up to speed on some realities that Washington would rather the American people not know.
Arguing that the United States itself has enabled the recent “North Korean charm offensive” — which includes Kim Jong Un’s sister attending the Olympic games and the dictator himself offering to hold a summit with South Korea’s president — Heer reviews Trump administration actions that have served to increasingly divide the U.S. and one of its closest allies. He points in particular to Trump’s belligerent “fire and fury” language towards North Korea, as well as reports that his administration is seriously considering a limited first-strike against North Korea. This "tough" rhetoric, whatever its effects on North Korea turn out to be, seems to have had a decisive impact on South Korea: its leadership has taken it seriously enough to explore an improvement of relations with the North. In a nutshell, the U.S.’s apparent willingness to go to war, at the possible cost of literally millions of South Korean lives, has suggested to the South Koreans that this may not be the sort of alliance that actually keeps their country safe.
The Trump administration notion that the situation on the Korean Peninsula is all about U.S. security first and foremost was perhaps best encapsulated by CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who last month said that “this administration is prepared to do what it takes to ensure that people in Los Angeles and Denver and New York aren’t held at risk from Kim Jong-un having a nuclear weapon.” As Heer notes, “His words are consistent not just with the madman theory, but Trump’s broader America First agenda. Pompeo’s statement implies a belief that American lives are so valuable that any threat to them from a foreign power, however remote, is worth a war that would unquestionably cause mass death in Seoul.” Heer also references a report from Vox, in which a variety of experts assert that a war on the Korean Peninsula might include casualties in the millions.
It seems like it should be unnecessary to point this out, but a declared U.S. policy that accepts the death of millions of civilians — and not just any old civilians, but civilians of an ally — as the outcome of a successful foreign policy is on its face a outright catastrophic moral and political failure. There is no scenario in which U.S. actions that resulted in the deaths of millions would not permanently destroy our country’s reputation in the world; putting it in terms that these Dr. Strangelovian strategists claim to understand, this would catastrophically undermine U.S. national security, however you wanted to define that term.
In an accompanying tweet, Heer makes the case that not just conservatives, but Americans from across the political spectrum, have been unable to see how such thinking would alienate the South Koreans because of a basic inability to imagine matters from the South Korean perspective; as evidence, he points to various commentary asserting that the South Koreans are simply being duped by North Korea's overtures. Heer’s retort is that no people understand the threat of North Korea better than South Koreans, and so the openness to better relations with such a brutal and feared regime should be seen in the light of serious U.S. diplomatic failures.
What really unnerves me about Heer’s point regarding U.S. willingness to accept mass death as long as it happens to non-Americans is that this is hardly a new or unfamiliar mindset. In fact, if so many Americans seem not to realize the horror of Trump administration policy, not to mention the counterproductive nature of such slaughter, it’s likely because such thinking has been at the heart of the war on terror that’s now fast approaching its second decade. The idea that the U.S. is always justified in killing people in other countries so long as it can be justified as saving American lives has arguably been THE central tenet of this catastrophic endeavor. It’s a notion that’s been tacitly accepted across the political spectrum, despite its patent immorality and quite demonstrable counter-productiveness to actual long-term American security. To see it pop up in the Korean context is illuminating, as it shows how this fundamentally immoral notion becomes demonstrably insane when applied to an actual ally. It should be obvious that a U.S. policy that results in the deaths of millions of civilians of a friendly nation could in no way be considered a success for America; yet this is the logic to which all Americans are invited to subscribe.
In the context of South Korea, such a policy, if carried out, would embrace such a twisted moral calculus as to permanently change what it means to be an American, re-defining our populace as a nation of sociopaths, without regard for any life beyond our own. Yet it’s chilling to realize that we’ve already applied this logic for years with nary a public discussion, counting the deaths of civilians in Afghanistan or Iraq or Pakistan as acceptable “collateral damage” so long as the government could point to American lives saved. Perhaps now that this logic has officially been taken to its most absurd extreme — contemplating the deaths of millions of South Koreans to save millions of Americans — people will begin to open their eyes to its indefensibility. The South Koreans, at least, have awakened to this insanity.
I’ll end with this theoretical question: if North Korea’s antagonism to the U.S comes from our alliance with South Korea, but South Korea manages a true reconciliation with the North, so that it no longer fears war, what exactly would be the U.S. involvement at that point? There is an underlying idea that North Korea is simply crazy, an abstract evil, but this is obviously not the case, but simply rhetoric from the American side. If the North and South no longer contemplated war with each other, would the United States continue to act as if North Korea were an existential threat to this country, or would we actually stand down? I sometimes get the sense that the Trump administration feels it needs North Korea as a bogeyman to distract and scare the American people. I’ve thought before about how often foreign policy seems to just be domestic politics by other means, and North Korea often feels like a clear demonstration of this phenomenon: a way to manipulate and rouse one party’s base, a point only accentuated by the idea that even the most horrific of wars would not spill a drop of American blood, even at the sacrifice of untold numbers of foreign souls.
