In his U.N. speech, Trump threatened to "totally destroy" North Korea, if they attack us or our allies. Which led Kim to call Trump a "mentally deranged U.S. dotard, followed by his foreign minister raising the prospect of a hydrogen bomb explosion over the Pacific. Trump tweeted that Kim "won't be around much longer;" and Kim then said that the U.S. "has declared war," so now he claims the right to shoot down American planes. The U.S. denies it declared war.
China's diplomatic influence over North Korea hardly exists anymore, since Kim and Trump are directly addressing each other in tweets. China still has some economic sway, as North Korea's only significant trading partner. But China is reluctant to provoke any economic hardship there, because the result would be millions of starving North Koreans streaming over the border into China.
We're back to square one -- except that now North Korea is close to having nuclear bomb capability, which it sees as existentially necessary, the only way to defend itself against U.S. "aggression." Trump's aggressive verbal attacks have only heightened Kim's determination to be ready.
For his part, Trump said, in that same U.N. speech that "now is not the time for talking." And it was Saturday night, that he tweeted that Kim and his foreign minister "won't be around much longer."
The New York Times' Julie Hirschfield Davis writes of this "deep uncertainty about whether Mr, Trump is all talk or actually intends to act. The ambiguity could be a strategic part of an effort to intimidate Mr. Kim and keep him guessing. Or it could reflect a rash impulse by a leader with little foreign policy experience to vent his anger and stoke his supporters' enthusiasm."
Trump himself is enough of a loose cannon. His national security team and his chief of staff try to keep him from going too far; but they know that he reacts badly whenever he feels someone is trying to control his behavior.
The situation surrounding Kim may be even worse, though more predictable. I was impressed by an expert guest that was discussing this on MSNBC a few nights ago. Dr. Sue Mi Terry is a Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University's East Asia Institute. A former career national intelligence officer, Dr. Terry's specialty is U.S.-Northeast Asia relations, North Korean developing nuclear capability, and Korean politics and foreign policy.
Dr. Terry emphasized that the situation is now very dire, because there is such an authoritarian atmosphere around Kim, that no one dares to express any thought that in the slightest way deviates from what Kim has said. So now that he has vowed to strike back at Trump, no one around him will dare to caution him or try to suggest another approach.
Fortunately, we do still have people who will say No to Trump. Starting with his Chief of Staff, Gen. Kelly, who is perfectly capable of standing up to Trump -- but who tries to balance that with not provoking Trump's resistance to the point that he loses what influence he has gained.
Christopher Hill was George W. Bush's ambassador to South Korea and, as such, was the last American to hold formal talks with the North Korean government. Ambassador Hill told the New York Times that he and Secretary of State Condolessa Rice always cautioned President Bush "to avoid personal invectives," because they never help.
Yet senior officials say that Mr. Trump will continue his brinksmanship, especially the tweets, "no matter what his advisers do or say.
The exchange of insults continued over the weekend, with Trump now referring to Kim as "Little Rocket Man" and Kim upping the ante with threats of "rockets" to the entire mainland of the U.S.
Julie Davis' article continues:
"The source of much of the anxiety in and out of government and on both sides of the Pacific -- is whether the [national security team] would step in to prevent the president from taking the kind of drastic action that matches his words, if they believed it was imminent.
"Veterans of diplomacy and national security and specialists on North Korea fear that, whatever the intended result, Mr. Trump's increasingly bellicose threats and public insults of the notoriously thin-skinned Mr. Kim could cause the United States to careen into a nuclear confrontation driven by personal animosity and bravado."Dr. Terry, again, cautioned that we not get into a situation "where North Korea fundamentally miscalculates that an attack is coming. . . . It could lead us to stumble into a war that nobody wants."
Talk of nuclear war, blundering into a war that nobody wants . . . is so reminiscent of the Cold War with Russia and the standoff of the Cuban nuclear crisis, when the young Kennedy administration learned that Russia had a nuclear bomb stationed in Cuba, just 90 miles off our shores.
But the Oval Office was occupied than by President John Kennedy. . . . And President Donald Trump is no John Kennedy.
Somehow, because of the clown-quality of both Trump and Kim Jong Un, we aren't taking this seriously enough. We're waiting for the punch line, where Trump screams at Kim: "You're fired." And then we can turn off the TV and go to sleep.
But this is real life, folks. That's not the way it works.
Ralph
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