Trump, the Eternal GOP Asshole and Nuclear Psychopath
Shit is getting real:
There is nothing more to be said
about the depth of Donald Trump’s ignorance or his more consequential
lack of character—his selfishness, his cruelty, his caprice, his vanity,
his vindictiveness, his malignant narcissism. We know all that. What is
more interesting is what it will yield.
Last Friday, he kicked
off his weekend by firing off a set of abusive tweets at Carmen Yulin
Cruz, the beleaguered mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico. The explanation
was not hard to glean: the U.S. territory is a disaster zone in the wake
of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria; he had not paid much
attention to the sufferings of several million Americans for reasons
easily guessed, and took a bludgeoning in the media for his negligence.
And so after Cruz insisted that the plight of her city wasn’t “a good
news story,” Trump decided to heap abuse on the strained leader of a
suffering city. A decent president who thought Mayor Cruz’s reproaches
unjustified would have gently ignored them, and perhaps pointed out what
the federal government has done and can do for Puerto Rico. But then
again, a decent man would not have repeatedly sneered at and damned an
81-year-old war hero with a lethal cancer.
The consequences of Trump’s
preference for picking fights with some black football players rather
than seeing what could be done about Spanish-speaking victims of a
hurricane will be felt in predictable ways. One may expect angry voters
of Hispanic extraction to exact a price at the ballot box. But his
weekend tweets about his Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, will have
consequences that may be longer term and considerably darker.
In a
series of tweets on Sunday, Trump sneered at Tillerson’s diplomatic
efforts to engage with North Korea, which other members of the foreign
policy apparatus (to include the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs) have
dutifully and appropriately supported. “I told Rex Tillerson, our
wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to
negotiate with Little Rocket Man...Save your energy, Rex, we’ll do what
has to be done! Being nice to Rocket Man hasn't worked in 25 years, why
would it work now? Clinton failed, Bush failed, and Obama failed. I
won't fail.”
There are two things at work here. Trump has
emasculated his secretary of state, who clearly does not speak for the
administration. Some of Tillerson’s predecessors have fallen out of
favor with their presidents, but none has been so undercut in such a
public, dismissive way. And if Trump is serious, this means war, and a
war to eliminate North Korea’s nuclear weapons could lead not only to
the devastation of much of the Korean peninsula, but the first use of
such weapons—by the United States as likely as by the North
Koreans—since 1945.
There
is no middle path between some combination of deterrence, containment,
sanctions, covert action, and threats of preemption directed at North
Korea, on the one hand, and a preventive war on the other. The forces
impelling Pyongyang to acquire nuclear weapons are strong, and go well
beyond the vanity of the grandson of the country’s founder. For a
dictatorship whose slogan of self-reliance is national dogma, nuclear
weapons are the ultimate source of autonomy in a world of wealthier and
presumably hostile states. Nor will China squeeze Kim Jong Un hard
enough to make him yield. It does not want chaos on its southern border.
It does not want a unified Korea aligned with the United States. And
above all, it does not intend to act, or be seen to act, as America’s
sheriff.
Trump has chosen to say, and compel those who speak for
him to say, that North Korea’s possession of nuclear weapons and threats
leveled against the United States are themselves a casus belli. Yet
Pyongyang has nuclear weapons and has threatened the United States. He
has now repeatedly insisted that he will resolve the problem that has
bedeviled three of his predecessors, and has made it clear that
diplomacy is not the way. That leaves either North Korea’s surrender,
which will not happen, or war, or another broken promise.
The
incalculable costs of war could include the loss of hundreds of
thousands of Korean lives, and the loss of many thousands of U.S.
soldiers and civilians, including military dependents in Korea. It could
well bring about a Chinese intervention and direct confrontation with
Beijing. It would shatter what remaining confidence America’s allies
have in Washington’s good judgment.
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