A Position of Strength

Trump is getting lots of kudos for what appears to be progress on the North Korea front.  One congressman wants to give him the Nobel Peace Prize.  FOX News agrees, and can’t resist an opportunity to point out that Obama really didn’t do anything to deserve his.  (They do get something right occasionally.)  And now Trump’s followers have taken up the call to give the Great Leader a Nobel.  

     It’s a great story.  The North Korean regime has survived since WWII despite persistent US opposition.  And its nuclear program, especially as it began to show clear signs of success, has proven to be a thoroughly intractable problem for a series of US presidents from both parties.  But now the Great Leader has demonstrated his greatness once again.  Trump says a few mean words and waves his wiener a bit, and Rocket Man comes immediately to heel.  It’s a great story.  It’s too bad that it’s bullshit.

     Crediting Trump with Kim’s newfound enthusiasm for cooperation is much like crediting Reagan for the collapse of the USSR.  The Soviet clusterfuck was toppling off a cliff of its own making; Reagan happened along and said “Boo!” as it disappeared into the abyss.  There is a much more plausible explanation for Kim’s diplomatic maneuvers, and it doesn’t bode well for efforts to ensure that North Korea is not a nuclear power.  (Whether this is a reasonable or desirable policy is a topic for another essay.)

     Why is Kim Jong-Un suddenly so inclined toward diplomacy, after years of belligerence?  Two reasons suggest themselves.  First, he is finally able to negotiate from a position of strength.  He has, or at least he thinks he has, nuclear weapons with which to threaten targets of value to the US—either the US itself or its allies.  If the US should decide to pursue more aggressively a policy of “regime change,” Kim may not be able to stop it, but he can make it extremely costly for the US and the world.

     Second, it is obvious to anyone who reads the news that Trump is rather desperately in need of some sort of foreign policy success.  He has demonstrated his diplomatic ineptitude in virtually all his dealings with our allies and enemies.  And he hasn’t hesitated to express his admiration for dictators—Putin, Duterte, even Kim.  If Kim really does want to negotiate some sort of end to the Korean War (more on that below), Trump makes the perfect mark for whatever con he wants to run.  

     Trump’s ineptitude aside, there is really little reason to get excited about the “agreement” between Kim and Moon to formalize the end of the Korean War and pursue denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.  The war was not the result of some internal conflict in Korea that led to partition; it was a war between the US and the USSR (and later, China).  The status quo in Korea is much too politically useful to all these countries for any of them to make the sorts of concessions that might make it possible to bring a formal end to the conflict.

     And North Korea has proclaimed a willingness to give up its nuclear weapons programs before, with little result.  Now, the nuclear program is set to produce tangible results in the form of a much stronger negotiating position.  It is very unclear what Trump could promise that would incline Kim to relinquish his advantage, and even more unclear why Kim would trust anything Trump says.  Trump has already established a rationale for abandoning negotiations with Kim if they are “unfruitful,” and it hard to imagine how they could be anything else.  

     Time offers a sober analysis that supports my view that nothing much of substance is going on here.  Meanwhile, George Carlin provides a rather more unvarnished account of Trump’s foreign policy.

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.