Lil’ Kim & Co.

A new generation’s anxiety

“We will handle North Korea. We are gonna be able to handle them. It will be handled. We handle everything.”

— President Trump, Monday

SOME OF us are old enough to remember those duck- and- cover drills. Gather ’ round, chillen, and we’ll tell you a story:

A long time ago, there was something called The Cold War, in which the United States and the USSR were staring each other down from different parts of the globe. The late and unlamented evil empire known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics— which was Russia and her hostages at the time— pointed nuclear weapons at us. And we pointed ours at them. And the two sides tried to keep from blinking during the various proxy wars that both sides encouraged from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Korea. The reason we never had to duck and cover outside the occasional drill was simple: MAD. Also known as Mutually Assured Destruction. The Soviets and the Americans both understood there’d be no winning a global nuclear war. So the buttons went unpressed.

But that was because both sides were rational. What to do when the other side isn’t? Charles Krauthammer once compared North Korea to an ant colony, and noted that ant colonies don’t have good checks and balances. Every day, it seems, Lil’ Kim and his scientists get closer to a nuclear weapon and the means to deliver it to these shores. Over the weekend, the regime in Pyongyang launched another ICBM. Experts say if put on the proper trajectory, it could hit big cities in the United States— even as far east as New York City. The same experts say its accuracy might not be pinpoint, but who needs pinpoint when aiming at America’s east coast?

The president of the United States says we’re gonna be able to handle them because we handle everything. That’s assuring. What would be more assuring is if we could somehow know that this wasn’t more braggadocio, and Americans could trust him to have a plan. The man is famous for not caring much about policy details. Which is another reason to like the Cabinet he has around him.

But others are taking even more precautions than leaving everything to H. R. McMaster or Rex Tillerson, as capable as they may be. The other day the paper said some cities and counties, at least on the West Coast, were in the early stages of prepping for a nuclear attack. That is, putting together studies and plans that account for fallout and where to put the bodies. It might be too early to scare the kids with duck- and- cover drills again, but it’s never too early to plan.

This president’s options concerning North Korea are drying up. No matter the bombers flying over the peninsula over the weekend, a military strike would mean certain destruction for millions in Seoul, and maybe Japan, not to mention tens of thousands of American soldiers in Korea. Diplomacy is going nowhere. China isn’t much help, although it could be.

MAYBE the best thing the United States can do now is somehow assure the North Korean elites and workers that they’d be taken care of after a regime change and reunification. The West assured East Germans that their pensions would be honored after the wall came down. Similar messages should be sent to North Koreans, some of whom might think they’d be demoted in a reunited society, and many of whom have been brainwashed that only Kim Jong Un can help them.

Compared to East Germany in the 1980s, it’s trickier to get any messages to North Koreans. The place is so censored and out of communication that activists have taken to tying messages to small balloons and turning them loose at the 38th Parallel when the wind blows just right. But we know there’s a black market operating in the north, and that some media get through.

As far as foreign policy goes, Free North Korea Radio isn’t much of one. But if the West’s best option is for the North Koreans to make a change on their own, the least we can do is let them know that the rest of the world has their backs when it happens. If it happens.