In case you were wondering whether Donald Trump’s advisors were on board with the idea that he should personally insult Kim Jong-Un in front of the U.N. General Assembly this week, the answer is “no.”
And while it will come as no surprise that Trump’s “Rocket Man” rhetoric was apparently improvised, it’s important to guard against the tendency to become numb to the shenanigans. Because unfolding before your very eyes is what everyone with any sense warned would probably happen although it’s probably safe to say that even the most pessimistic of political analysts are surprised at just how quickly things have deteriorated.
“Senior aides to President Trump repeatedly warned him not to deliver a personal attack on North Korea’s leader at the United Nations this week, saying insulting the young despot in such a prominent venue could irreparably escalate tensions and shut off any chance for negotiations to defuse the nuclear crisis,” the LA Times reports, citing two U.S. officials. “Trump’s derisive description of Kim Jong Un as ‘Rocket Man on a suicide mission’ and his threat to ‘totally destroy’ North Korea were not in a speech draft that several senior officials reviewed and vetted Monday, the day before Trump gave his first address to the U.N. General Assembly,” the Times goes on to report.
Again, the fact that like us, you invariably aren’t surprised by that says something about just how little we’ve come to expect from the man who occupies the most powerful office on the face of the planet. Think about what you just read for a second. The President of the United States not only ignored “repeated” warnings by senior officials to avoid saying anything that might further destabilize a situation involving nuclear weapons, he deviated from a speech that was vetted just hours ahead of time on the way to threatening to annihilate an entire country. And he did it in a speech to the U.N. General Assembly. That is simply mind-boggling.
He is treating a nuclear standoff the way he would treat a Twitter dispute with a celebrity he doesn’t like. And indeed, he’s now using Twitter to send fresh insults Kim’s way.
“Some of Trump’s top aides, including national security advisor H.R. McMaster, had argued for months against making the attacks on North Korea’s leader personal, warning it could backfire,” the Times adds, before explaining that Trump has effectively made it impossible for anyone in Kim’s regime to act rationally. Consider this:
Given Kim’s record of putting political rivals and dissenters to death, including members of his own family, his public statement blasting Trump makes it highly unlikely that other North Korean officials would participate in talks about ending the country’s nuclear program, John Park, a specialist on Northeast Asia at Harvard’s Kennedy School said.
“There is no one on the North Korean side who is going to entertain or pursue discussion about a diplomatic off-ramp, because that individual would be contradicting the leader, which is lethal,” Park notes.
In case it isn’t obvious, this kind of thing should be grounds for impeachment or at the very least, for some kind of Congressional hearing on whether this person is fit to serve out his term.
It’s one thing to consult with your advisors and say something like: “listen, I understand your concerns, but I am the democratically elected commander-in-chief and I’ve decided to adopt a hard line approach, so given that you can’t stop me, help me figure out the most effective way to get my point across here without jeopardizing the lives of millions of people.” But it is entirely another to go completely off script, ignore a speech that was vetted just one day ahead of time, and then proceed to use an absurd nickname for a despot before threatening to literally wipe a country off the face of the planet.
Trump clearly has no conception of why that approach can’t and won’t work with Kim. Kim’s rule depends almost entirely on his God-like status with his own people. When you threaten to kill him in public (as opposed to communicating through backchannels that Washington is at wit’s end and a military strike is imminent), you have put Kim in an untenable position. He has to choose between appearing weak or going ahead and doing something that proves he’s not. That is not a choice for someone in his position.
You have to ask yourself what happens next here. What if Kim does test a hydrogen bomb in the Pacific?
“I do worry this would be the quickest pathway to conflict. If a commercial airliner came down or a ship was destroyed, we’d be off to the races,” Vipin Narang, a nuclear strategy expert at the MIT said on Friday. Here’s more from the linked NBC article:
“A lot of things can go wrong in flight,” said Narang, author of the book “Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era.”
“If the warhead doesn’t detonate precisely where you want it to, or if you have a lower altitude, you can have a lot of fallout. The worry is if the missile goes awry and the warhead hits land, any dirt that was thrown up with the fallout would be radioactive.”
The result? “You’d have radioactive poisoning symptoms, loss of vegetation and animal life, and of course long-term health risks for people,” Narang said.
Make no mistake, if Pyongyang makes good on that threat, someone will have to conduct a military strike on the regime. There won’t be any way around it.
And at that point maybe everyone will understand why Donald Trump cannot be President.
Last week I predicted 2 weeks until showtime. I think we are right on track (sadly). I hope to god China picks our side. Maybe the entangled finances of our two countries will be a saving grace.
I don’t see him putting a warhead on a missile and testing it that way. But I do see them putting it on a sacrificial vessel, sailing it out into open water, and then detonating it. That way you control where you want it.
A few thousand, mostly military men, live high off the hog that is the slave colony called N. Korea. My only hope is that there are enough of them that don’t want to loose their ‘gig’, that they poison the fat bastard before they loose everything.
I think that has a better chance of happening than the impeachment of America’s fat bastard.
You may be on to something…as Nero is once purported to have said..”You send a dog to kill a dog…” China gets nothing but Yalu River trouble by strictly adopting a US sanction regime on No. Korea. They MIGHT have a great deal to gain with Jong-Un’s removal..especially if a proposal is solidified with a guarantee to remove all US troops from So. Korean soil. They OBVIOUSLY DETER NOTHING….
China arranges the necessary moves..the US stands clear yet supports China when China reluctantly announce that it is greatly relieved that an unstable and threatening obstacle to world peace and trade has been replaced by more reasonable people.
Oh yeah! So. Korea throws in $10 Billion in immediate “humanitarian” aid to the No. in order to help their people recover from the yoke of a Fascist Dictatorship.
Think the funeral would be well attended??
“Think the funeral would be well attended??”
About the same as Mussolini’s.
> A few thousand, mostly military men, live high off the hog that is the slave colony called N. Korea.
Ditto for America, writ large! Dwight D. Eisenhower was so prescient.
To hell with both of those fascist turd holes.
A few thousand, mostly military men, live high off the hog that is the slave colony called USA. My only hope is that there are enough of them that don’t want to loose their ‘gig’, that they poison the fat bastard before they lose everything.
Either that or we all pray for the impeachment of the fat bastard.
Whatever “position” Kimbo is in he put himself there. Heisenberg’s article is a catalog of selective reasoning and predetermined conclusions. Not only can a President call a viscous little problem maker “Rocket Man..” he did. Trump also clearly reiterated (this was NOT a new position) that attacking the US was a one way ticket to annihilation. So what? Does anyone out there think that Jong-Un and his military staff don’t know that reality..whether it’s spoken or not?
Trump and the United States military are in a very difficult position not because of what Trump has said but because it has been ASSUMED by every President preceding him that an ally we have protected for over 60 years would support the United States in the kind of situation now faced. They don’t and won’t. China will NOT help..all of this is to their advantage. Ditto Russia.
No. Korea has played the wild and crazy card forever…Trump has played a Counter Gambit..instead of being “reasonable” as his predecessors he has thrown an unsettling
response at Jong-Un and now has him and his military wondering just what real constraints there may be on their nuclear/missile development.
“Trump has played a Counter Gambit”
no. Trump is just an idiot. this line that people cling to about “oh, he’s got a strategy” is ridiculous.
how about coming to grips with reality, which is this: “oh, that’s right, we elected a reality TV show host who everyone knew was an idiot and now he’s still an idiot.”
surprise! who could have known?
Unrealistic to expect China to be able or willing to help resolve N.Korea. China cannot exert that much influence on the matter as there exists significant limits to its leverage over the North Korean regime and South Korean government.
China prefers the status quo in North Korea in order to perpetuate a buffer zone on the Korean peninsula and to prevent a refugee crisis from spilling into China.
Great piece H.
I’ve held the view that Kim’s bark is worse than his bite (he knows if he pushes things too far that’ll be the end of him) however push him too far into a corner……
In my view Trump has played this all wrong. Sure Kim is playing up but like a spot if you scratch it you’ll make it worse, ignore it and it’ll go away. But because of Trump’s ego he can’t stand idly by so he has to get his dick out and wave it around as well. So people may die because of 2 fat privileged pricks who I suspect are both mentally ill.
(I reckon Kim has money on a long Volatility position anyway haha!).
How much of Kim’s behavior is attributable to Trump’s comments? Silence would be way more powerful here.
Exactly. Kim is like a child playing up, you don’t wind him up further.
Fewer words and more deeds would probably be more effective from a global standpoint.