Thunder from the east

Just when things were looking sunny

IT HAPPENED during those long-running talks about talking with the North Koreans about dismantling their nuclear program.

This time His Tweetership-in-chief Donald A. Trump announced to all and sundry: “Our United States team has arrived in North Korea to make arrangements for the Summit between Kim Jong Il and myself. I truly believe North Korea has brilliant potential and will be a great economic and financial Nation one day.

Kim Jong Un agrees with me on this. It will happen!”

Our president’s optimism was echoed by a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of State, Heather Nauert, who said these on-again, off-again talks were on again. “We continue to prepare for a meeting between the president and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.” Well, we’ll see what we shall see, but our considered opinion is that there’s no telling what’ll happen next in this protracted negotiation, which certainly beats protracted war.

For now all is upbeat, but by the time Gentle Reader sees these words in Arkansas’ Newspaper, all could be off again and this communique could give way to a downbeat one. But peace would be wonderful in place of the formal state of war that has continued on the Korean peninsula since 1953, which is a long time to live in limbo that is neither war nor peace but some shadowland in between.

Even now the Chinese giant on the mainland is making bellicose noises and engaging in warlike gestures. Americans should have learned by now to take Beijing’s threats seriously. General Douglas MacArthur’s greatest and possibly only mistake during a long career was to dismiss such talk, only to find the troops under his allied command facing swarms of Chinese as they advanced on his suddenly beleaguered United Nations’ forward positions. That time they poured across the Yalu and threatened to overrun for forces by land. This time they’re coming by sea.

A front-page story datelined Beijing quoted Red China’s military as announcing it had dispatched its fleet to confront a couple of American vessels in waters of the South China Sea that the Chinese claim as their own. Two American warships, the destroyer Higgins and the cruiser Antietam, were said to have passed within only 12 nautical miles of the Paracel Islands, an archipelago in the South China Sea off the coast of Vietnam. Much too close for comfort.

A spokesman for Red China’s ministry of national defense accused the United States of having “gravely violated Chinese sovereignty.” A trade war between Washington and Beijing is serious enough; a shooting war between the two great powers would be a far more serious development with repercussions for the whole world.

The world has quite enough trouble spots on a crowded map without risking another.