Sleep easy as Donald Trump mad-libs through a nuclear crisis
North Korean standoff is a scenario some of us feared from Day 1
This is what we feared all along, isn’t it? An uninformed, insecure U.S. president, his hand not far from the nuclear codes, stumbling into a potential world crisis like — as he would put it — “the world has never seen.”
Well, strap in. As long as Donald Trump imitates North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in sounding and acting like a schoolyard bully, this latest crisis may indeed spiral out of control.
Until now, the risk of North Korea’s nuclear ambitions has united the world. It has been one of the few global threats that have been universally condemned. This has been even more remarkable given how divided and polarized the world is on virtually every other major international issue.
But North Korea’s nuclear threat is different. Not only has it been on the global agenda for years, most analysts agree there is absolutely no military solution. Stumbling into a military conflict — likely a nuclear crisis — would result in hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of casualties.
There is very little international disagreement about this. The impasse has been staring everyone in the face for years. Like it or not, the only conceivable solution is a diplomatic one, most nota- bly the freezing of North Korea’s nuclear program.
However short-lived, last weekend was a good day in this tough diplomatic journey. On Saturday, the UN Security Council unanimously passed new sanctions against North Korea. They were the toughest to date against a regime already suffering from international sanctions for more than a decade.
ROME— During a visit to Moscow in 1980, Marco Minniti, a bald and bold young functionary in the Italian Communist Party, mortified his comrades by asking a Red Army general why the Soviets had occupied Afghanistan. The general pointed south on a map and explained that the faraway land mattered for his country’s national security.
Now, decades later, it is Minniti, Italy’s powerful interior minister and the hard-nosed veteran of its intelligence apparatus, who is looking south — but to Africa, which he calls the “mirror of Europe.”
A mass migration streaming up Africa, through Libya and across the Mediterranean — enabled by human traffickers and exploited by political populists — poses an existential challenge to his centre-left government, not to mention his country and continent.
To stem the flow of migrants — and the potential infiltration of terrorists — Minniti, a 61-year-old former communist, is calling on his vast government experience, Calabrian brio and the sub-rosa relationships he developed as Italy’s “Lord of the Spies.”
“I know, let’s say, many things,” Minniti said with a sly smile in an interview in his office in Rome, surrounded by bookcases filled with tomes about espionage and religious fanaticism.
According to Nicola Latorre, an Italian senator and ally of the minister, Minniti was the “protagonist” of the recent breakthrough, when Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj of Libya requested the support of Italian naval ships to counter human trafficking.
It is a risky endeavour that Italy has nevertheless sought for years, desperate to cut the migrant flow. Its success or failure now falls to Minniti, who polls show to be a popular member of a government with uncertain chances in the next election.
Some political observers have even suggested that Minniti, with his leftist background and ability to please conservatives with tough talk on security, might be a good candidate for prime minister. He has already served in five centre-left Italian governments.
Minniti dismissed such talk. He said he was instead more focused on countering Islamic radicalism by making pacts with local imams that required them to preach in Italian, building new relationships in Africa and working with the Libyans to defeat human traffickers.
“Human relationships count a lot,” the old spymaster said.
The number of migrants who have landed in Italy this year totals more than 95,000, with about 2,000 who drowned. It is a crisis that has defied nearly every attempt to solve it.
Despite a mix of appeals and threats by Minniti at European Union meetings, neighbouring countries have done little to share Italy’s crushing burden.
In particular, tensions have risen with President Emmanuel Macron of France, who has resisted ac- cepting migrants and started an uncertain peace process in Libya that, critics here say, blindsided Italy and weakened its chances of stopping traffickers by legitimizing a rival of al-Sarraj.
Minniti said that he agreed in principle with Macron on trying to reach peace in Libya, but that a target of 2018 would be too late for him. “I cannot wait,” he said.
He argued that smashing human trafficking networks and investing in Libyan mayors were the best ways to stabilize a porous southern Libyan border that allows migrants from traditionally “francophone” African countries to pass.
As Minniti fidgeted with a silver Casio watch, representatives of humanitarian organizations met in the ministry with officials to try to agree on a new code of conduct for rescuing migrants near Libyan waters.
More than 40 per cent of migrants at sea are now rescued by private aid ships and Minniti wants to make sure those ships are not colluding with traffickers — an accusation popular among right-wing politicians, white nationalist groups and a Sicilian prosecutor.
He also insists it is appropriate that the Italian police be able to board those ships.
“My duty is to be close to those who are afraid, to reassure them, to liberate them from fear,” said Minniti, who argued that the left can no longer afford to ignore or look down on people scared by immigration or terrorism.
“I think fear is the crucial element of the next 10 years in democracy,” he said. “In Italy and all the world.”
That law-and-order talk has been too much for some of Minniti’s old comrades on the left. (One left-leaning newspaper suggested that Minniti thought he was Batman.) But the intense and abstemious minister said service to the state was in his blood.
His father was one of nine brothers to make a career in the military. In high school in Reggio Calabria, he developed a love of the ancient poet Catullus.
But his true passion was for the skies. He hoped to follow his family’s tradition by becoming an air force pilot. Instead, his mother put her foot down, saying the family had already given enough.
Minniti said he took the ban badly. (The shelves of his office still display the models of the jets he once hoped to fly.)
In an act of rebellion, he studied philosophy at the University of Messina. He wrote his thesis on the Georgics of Virgil, and to help understand the exploitation of slaves in the ancient Roman fields, he said, “I used Marx.”
Those studies helped bring him closer to the Communist Party and when he graduated, he said, his father showed how proud he was of his communist philosopher son “when he didn’t show up.”
But that opposition only fuelled Minniti’s conviction as he sought to stand up for the country’s democratic values in dangerous sections of Calabria ruled by one of Italy’s feared mafias, the ’Ndrangheta.
In the 1980s, he began working closely with the Communist Party’s rising star, Massimo D’Alema. In the early 1990s, Minniti — by then married to a musician, Mariangela, with whom he has two daughters — moved with D’Alema to form a new political party.
When D’Alema became prime minister in1998, he brought Minniti in as his righthand man. The young aide worked at a desk once used by Benito Mussolini, and less than a month into his tenure answered a secure phone in his bedroom.
“I was convinced it would never ring,” he said.
Italian authorities had stopped Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, who was considered a terrorist by many, as he entered Italy. Minniti ordered his arrest, setting off on a crash course in international intelligence operations and spycraft. The experience — followed by his crucial role in the Italian intervention in Kosovo — gave him a taste for security work.
In 1999, he made his first visit to Libya, a former Italian colony, and began to learn about its disparate centres of power. Today, he rattles off names of Libyan towns where traffickers loom, places he says he knows better than his native Calabria.
But whether that deep experience can resolve Italy’s migrant crisis remains a long shot. Like with an earlier agreement with the Libyans that Minniti helped broker, not all has gone according to plan.
The minister knows skepticism is high and said that when he first broached dealing with Libya, which lacked an empowered interlocutor with whom to negotiate, critics “laughed in my face.”
“They said, ‘You don’t understand the most basic thing: Libya is unstable.’ ”
What he does understand, he said, is that such instability means anything can happen at any time and that any deal could blow up. “But we have built a path.”