Trump with nukes: A very scary reality
On Tuesday, apparently without consulting his national security team, President Trump issued a nuclear threat. If North Korea continued on its current course, he warned, they would be met by “fire and fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.”
Almost immediately, his aides began to walk that back. By Wednesday morning, Secretary of State Tillerson went on television to explain that the President’s remarks did not mean that the United States was moving closer to a military option. That was followed by a statement from Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis further clarifying the President’s intention.
Even if the immediate crisis now begins to subside, we are hardly out of the woods. The North Korean nuclear and ICBM programs continue apace. The Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that Pyongyang has mastered the technology required to marry a nuclear warhead to a long-range ballistic missile. That is precisely the milestone that Donald Trump took to Twitter in January to declare he would never permit: “North Korea just stated that it is in the final stages of developing a nuclear weapon capable of reaching parts of the U.S. It won’t happen!”
Given that both Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump are notoriously unpredictable characters, no one can forecast how this crisis will end. But we can make some critical observations about the possibility of a catastrophic outcome.
Even if America were today led by a great statesman, the level of danger would be extraordinarily high. We do not know now and will never know with a sufficient degree of certainty if Kim, who recently ordered the assassination of his own half-brother, is rational enough to be deterred from lobbing a nuclear weapon at an American city.
And of course, Trump is not a great statesman. At best, he can be characterized as highly inexperienced. He’s spent his career running a family business, which included establishing a fraudulent university and casinos he drove into bankruptcy.
His knowledge of Korean affairs is not deep. Following his meeting with China’s president Xi Jinping in April, Trump explained to The Wall Street Journal that, “after listening for 10 minutes, I realized it’s not so easy.”
Nor is Trump’s knowledge of nuclear affairs particularly sophisticated, as was made obvious in a Republican debate in which he was pressed to explain how he would approach management of the nuclear triad. “I think — I think, for me, nuclear is just the power, the devastation is very important to me,” was all he could stammer.
We can add into the mix Trump’s consistently hawkish inclinations.
Though he made his opposition to the Iraq War a centerpiece of his presidential campaign, in actual fact, in the period before bullets were flying, he supported the war. We saw the aggressive side of our President reveal itself strikingly when he bragged about serving the “most beautiful chocolate cake” to Xi Jinping as he told him that a fusillade of cruise missiles was raining down on Syria.
Pertinent as well is Trump’s uncertain attitude toward the absolute taboo that exists on the use of nuclear weapons. “Why are we making them? Why do we make them?” he has wondered aloud about the fact that they have not been used in war since the Harry Truman administration. It is a disturbing but not an idle question.
The relevant fact is that after Truman dropped A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a succession of American Presidents, including Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon and even the dovish Jimmy Carter, have contemplated the use of nuclear weapons in various crises. All shrunk from the action itself.
Trump may be different. This is an erratic man who revels in shattering norms, who lies blatantly and with abandon. The nuclear taboo is out there beckoning him.
As Trump’s support drops to record lows, as he loses Republican allies in Congress, as the Mueller investigation closes in, and he faces humiliation of a kind he has spent his entire life trying to dodge, we can only make one solid prediction: As long as Donald Trump is President of the United States, a wise, experienced, steady hand will not be in control of weapons that can annihilate cities and kill millions within minutes.