By David K. Shipler
President
Trump’s threats that the military is “locked and loaded” to unleash “fire and
fury” on North Korea are likely to be turned around by history as phrases of
self-mockery. They will—hopefully—be on the same list of absurdities as
“Mission Accomplished,” that huge banner hung on the aircraft carrier Abraham
Lincoln as President George W. Bush spoke of victory in Iraq prematurely, in
2003. Or, remember President Lyndon B. Johnson’s swashbuckling call to US troops
in Vietnam to “nail the coonskin to the wall?” As Michael Beschloss notes, it
came long after LBJ himself, in 1965, had expressed serious doubts in private
that the war was winnable.
Trump’s
hawkish generals—his chief of staff, national security advisor, and defense
secretary—seem to know what he does not: that war with North Korea is also
unwinnable, because even using conventional weapons alone, Pyongyang could kill
hundreds of thousands of South Koreans in Seoul and elsewhere within range of
the North’s well-bunkered artillery. As American military analysts have noted,
the North could send troops pouring across the demilitarized zone, and China
would be tempted to enter the fighting. A nuclear exchange would be the
Armageddon of the atomic age.
Trump loves
making grandiose (empty) promises and flat statements of tough-guy rhetoric.
It’s been suggested that he’s still in real-estate mogul mode, figuring that
starting a negotiation with a rash demand gets you a favorable compromise in
the end. The trouble is, he sounds more like an unhinged Mafia chieftain than a
sober United States president. In threatening North Korea’s annihilation, he
reinforces the anti-American propaganda that has propelled Pyongyang’s
painstaking acquisition of its nuclear capability.
As Jean Lee, a former Associated
Press correspondent in Pyongyang writes in TheNew York Times, the North has schooled children to hate America and fear its
aggression. So Trump’s rhetoric now plays into the hands of Kim Jong-un, who
needs fear of attack and invasion to weld his people into a compliant mass
beneath his dictatorship. Perhaps Trump also needs an outside enemy (in
addition to ISIS) to shore up his waning support among Americans and distract
from the special counsel’s accelerating investigation of the Russia affair.
