Who’s crazier, Donald Trump or Kim Jong-un?
With tireless commitment to the role, North Korea’s various Dear, Supreme, Great, superlative-loving leaders have for seven decades played the part of the demented lunatic. They’ve now met their match in a man who is every bit as mad as they take great pains to appear.
Not so very long ago, in a time that now seems so innocent and carefree, it would have been Pyongyang making threats about “fire and fury”; last week, it was Washington.
Kim Jong-un’s deranged bluster has always been strategic and put-on; Donald Trump’s is not. There’s a greater-than-zero chance that nuclear war will strike that place where contrived craziness meets the real thing.
Of course, not everyone agrees that Trump is mad, and even fewer believe that Kim is rational.
Some object to calling Trump crazy. But until the gods of the English language create a word that captures Trump’s particular blend of selfaggrandizement, self-harm and erotic musings about his own daughter, the word “crazy” may have to do — especially when “crazy” is often intended not so much as an amateur psychiatric diagnosis as an acknowledgement of an American president’s inclination to consistently undermine his own domestic political prospects and the interests of the country he leads.
Others protest that whether or not the term “crazy” is unkind, it’s not applicable to Trump. If Trump is crazy, then he’s crazy like a fox, or at least like a man who deploys exclamation marks and ALLCAPS to wage Twitter wars against Broadway musicals, all for the diabolical purpose, it is surmised, of distracting a gullible populace from scandals that would in ordinary times threaten the American presidency.
Someone who says enough crazy things will inevitably distract people from all the crazy things he does, though. This isn’t a sign that at his core he is a rational man; it’s a sign that his irrationality knows no limits. If he were actually the mastermind some suspect he is, you’d think he wouldn’t use his Twitter superpowers to possibly obstruct justice by threatening the then-FBI director. Publicly. In writing.
But while many people mistakenly believe Trump is not crazy, or that it’s unkind to describe him as such, many more err in thinking that Kim is certifiably insane. What else but psychopathy would compel him to call perceived rivals “dirty prostitutes,” “cannibals” and “worse than a dog ”?
Well, survival. Most North Korea experts observe the regime acts irrationally for perfectly rational reasons. It doesn’t have international respect, it doesn’t have any economy to speak of, it doesn’t even have good aim. It could never have lasted this long without acting like a madman with a gun who isn’t afraid to use it, even if many of its bullets will land in the Sea of Japan, and even if no one shot at it first. It knows it would lose in a fight, but it also realizes it’s in America’s interests to avoid one.
The trouble is that Trump can’t play the straight man to Kim’s raving maniac. He doesn’t seem to care to protect America’s interests and he picks fights compulsively. A furious, fiery conflict with North Korea would mean millions of refugees, escalated tensions with China and Russia, and a destabilized Asia, but never mind all that — someone on TV called the president a prostitute or a cannibal or a dog, so where did those launch codes go? This means war.
Nuclear deterrence depends on everyone being rational enough to choose living over dying, even if someone has to act crazy to survive. North Korean leaders only pretended to be mad because they thought American leaders would be sane. The hermit kingdom isn’t alone in wrongly assuming that, at least.