Trump’s dangerous Twitter diplomacy
From the Toronto Star, published Jan. 3:
It is an inherently human characteristic to want to impose meaning even where there is only chaos. Take, for instance, the response to Donald Trump’s latest apocalypse-baiting tweet and the so-called foreign policy of which it is part.
“North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times,”’ Trump tweeted on Wednesday. “Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”
This latest bit of puerile and seemingly unhinged brinkmanship set off commentators once again in search of the strategic impetus behind Trump’s rhetoric.
Perhaps, some said, Trump is playing bad cop to South Korea’s good cop; as Seoul attempts to open a dialogue with Pyongyang, Trump may simply be showing North Korean leader Kim Jong Un how catastrophic is diplomacy’s alternative. Perhaps, others said, Trump is taking a Nixonian approach, deliberately sowing confusion to destabilize his enemies. Yet others wondered whether the president might be using the threat of nuclear war to distract from his unpopular domestic agenda.
The parsimonious explanation, of course, is that Trump’s mine-is-bigger tweet is nothing more than another expression of his own juvenile tendency toward one-upsmanship. Certainly there’s no reason to think it’s part of a thought-out and unified policy on North Korea. Trump, his secretary of state and his ambassador to the United Nations regularly contradict one another on the subject. In any case, given that American observers seem utterly confounded by the president’s intentions, imagine how the North Koreans and their bellicose leader feel.
What is becoming increasingly clear is that whether or not Trump has a plan, he is not nearly up to the delicate job of defusing tensions with North Korea. The game he is playing could not be more dangerous. If Kim perceives Trump’s threats as empty bluster, he may believe he has licence to act with impunity. If, on the other hand, he takes Trump seriously, the consequences could be catastrophic. History is rich with wars started by miscalculation.
And what if Trump does mean what he says? Whatever the case, we should be very worried.
Journalist Susan B. Glasser recently reported in Politico that various international diplomats describe Trump’s approach to foreign affairs as “catastrophic,” “terrifying,” “incompetent” and “dangerous.” It is not hyperbole to say that when he brags about how big his button is, he puts global stability at risk. It matters little what he thinks he’s up to. Someone needs to take his Twitter away.