Fire and Fury...and Bullshit

Trump continues to blunder around trying to provoke Kim Jong Un into doing something stupid.  That would give Trump an opportunity to do something stupid, in turn.  And so far, doing something stupid seems to be Trump’s strong suit.  This will get the ball rolling, and we can have an escalation of stupidity until a bunch of people die.

     Or maybe not.  I don’t know enough about North Korea (and I am not entirely convinced that anyone else does either) to understand clearly what it is trying to accomplish with its nuclear belligerence, or to make any sort of guess about what Kim Jong Un (or whoever really runs the country) will actually do.  Perhaps there is someone in the North Korean government with enough sense to understand the consequences of an attack, and especially a nuclear attack, against the US or anyone else.  Perhaps, as Ed Krayewski argues, North Korea is simply responding in a not entirely unreasonable way to the lessons of the last few decades of US foreign policy.  After all, Krayewski points out, the US does not invade countries that have nuclear weapons.

     Matters are pretty obscure here in the US, as well.  Trump’s ministers and flunkies were quick to insist that we shouldn’t take Trump’s “fire and fury” too literally or too seriously.  He was, they say, just improvising.  I find this neither surprising nor comforting.  Trump is always improvising, that is to say, making it up as he goes along.  He clearly has no view or plan beyond the moment.  And now that his improvising seems to be going nuclear, it might be time to dust off the old fallout shelter plans.  (I am comforted by the knowledge that my wife is a Certified Fallout Shelter Manager.)  Duck and cover.

     A surprising number of US citizens consider North Korea a critical threat to the US and favor an aggressive military stance.  A tiny place that can’t feed its own people; a military made up of mostly nonfunctional models; some first generation nukes that our military could easily knock out of the sky.  This is a perfect target for a president and a country that want to demonstrate that we are number one.  How could we lose?  After all, there are so many victories in our history of engagements with small, powerless countries like North Korea—Korea itself, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq again, and so forth.   

     Both Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un sit atop very unstable power structures.  The North Korean dictatorship rules with fear and starvation.  Its people are restive, its southern sibling is a constant irritant, and its leader is widely viewed as a doofus.  Trump faces serious resistance domestically, the disgust of most of our allies, and an apparent inability to put together anything resembling a functional government.  (And he is also widely viewed as a doofus.)  The political positions of both of these men benefit considerably from the conflict they are creating.  

     I think it is about time someone gave these guys some adult advice.