National Post (National Edition)
Trump’s volatility an ongoing worry
Potential flashpoints are manifesting
The most sinister parlour game of our times is wargaming if, when and where Donald Trump will strike should he decide, as so many leaders before him have, that he needs a war to burnish his reputation as a decisive leader or to help the electorate overlook his blunders.
The commander-in-chief is embarked on a US$54-billion military spending spree to increase his options. At or near the top of Trump’s potential hit-list would most likely be North Korea, Iran, Russia and China. Another possibility is a wider war against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and al-Qaida. In fact, that never-ending drama is already having new chapters written in Syria, Yemen and — although we don’t hear much about it yet — maybe Libya.
Each of these present different challenges. ISIL excepted, what these adversaries have in common is that they have long-range missiles and nuclear weapons, or badly want to have them. Even were there a good reason to hit one of the potential targets, attacking any of them is fraught with peril.
The conventional thinking — if there is such a thing since last November’s U.S. presidential election — is that however mercurial Trump may be, he has sensible, thoughtful security advisers such as Jim Mattis. Trump’s defence secretary would surely dissuade the president from doing anything rash, especially as regards China and Russia, the latter of which he told his Senate confirmation hearing was the leading threat that the U.S. faces.
But Trump confuses every prediction because he revels in his reputation as a wild card. He is emotional and bombastic and likes to make policy on the fly. He has spoken admiringly of Vladimir Putin. On China his rhetoric has been all over the place and often ferocious.
Potential flashpoints already exist. Earlier this month the U.S. Navy moved the USS Carl Vinson carrier battle group into the South China Sea, sailing near sandbars and coral reefs where Beijing has built air and missile bases to support its absurd Nine-Dash Line claim to almost all of these strategic waters. The Bonhomme Richard Expeditionary Strike Group, with Marines embarked, is also at sea in the western Pacific.
The Vinson and Bonhomme Richard are essentially on routine patrols — but tell that to China. Beijing views security through its own narrow prism and has been shouting that such cruises are intolerable. Always in the background, in Beijing as well as in Moscow, is the deep-seated sentiment that Washington has never given either of them the respect they deserve.
Russia has been displeased with Trump’s endorsement of NATO’s plan, approved by Barack Obama last June, to deploy a U.S.led combat brigade in the Baltic states this year.
Ignoring Russia’s seizure of Crimea, the bloody civil war that it instigated in eastern Ukraine and the massive, more-or-less constant military exercises it undertakes near its Baltic borders, the Kremlin has threatened unspecified consequences over the buildup in Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. It claims that what the U.S., with Canada, Germany and Britain in train, are doing in the Baltics is a hostile act that could lead to war.
The case for Trump acting to thwart the burgeoning nuclear ambitions of North Korea or Iran is much clearer. This is partly because nobody in their right mind wants these states to acquire nuclear weapons, let alone ones that can be fired halfway around the planet. The other reason is because the potential consequences of acting against Pyongyang or Tehran are not quite as scary as trying to take on China or Russia.
However, nobody can say with certainty that one-off, multi-pronged, synchronized attacks would eliminate either of these fledgling nuclear programs. To achieve success will likely require a deeper commitment of time and resources with potentially deadly side effects because Iran is allied with Russia and North Korea is allied with Beijing, which would almost certainly lash out if an attack takes place so close to its territory. The knot becomes even more tangled if Israel becomes part of an Iran gambit, which Benjamin Netanyahu, who has his own domestic political problems about which he wants voters to forget, badly wants it to be.
The first serious test of Trump’s international resolve was Pyongyang’s recent firing of a new missile off Japan. Until now Trump and his spokesmen have only huffed and puffed in public about that. But that does not mean we won’t wake up one morning to discover the U.S. is at war over there, or in Iran.
As with every potential war scenario, what would come after any military action anywhere is always at the centre of wargaming. The fallout of a U.S. attack on research facilities and missile launchers in North Korea might include an immediate and terrifying North Korean nuclear response against South Korea or Japan, or an assault by millions of North Korean ground troops into the south.
Lest we forget, Kim Jong Un may be even more madcap, volatile and capricious than Donald Trump is.