Button diplomacy Trump could use lesson from TR

Guest writer

“My button is much bigger than your button.” Okay, are we done here? The careless provocation from the president of the United States to North Korea’s Kim Jung Un should place the entire world on alert that we have a mad man in the White House. The fact of Donald Trump flirting with nuclear war out of his own bizarre conception of presidential power, a fear voiced often enough during the presidential campaign by his opponents and since his election by even members of his party, is upon us.

This is not schoolyard bullying or some redneck “my kid Eric can beat up your honor student” mentality but apparently Trump’s actual worldview, that is to say Trump view, since they seem to be one and the same. What’s the point of having a bigger button if you can’t push it?

The Republicans who characteristically are still defending him have it right this time: This is Trump being Trump!

We know that Trump being Trump seems always to have been a braggart and a bully. But as disheartening as it has been to see the elected leader of the United States sneer at the handicapped, denigrate women, belittle the press, attack the environment, backtrack on health care, and blatantly work for his own financial self-interest, it is also possible to turn those attitudes and actions around over time (think midterm elections and an ever-changing national consciousness). Granted, if your health insurance is lost and your national forests are savaged beyond repair, time may not seem worth much.

However, this provocative “My button is much bigger than your button” tack risks immediate and devastating results from an unstable but increasingly technologically capable regime.

Although it does not change the fact nor, in my view, the need of the United States’ superior military capability to protect us, this coarse threat, following so many other similar statements by Trump, certainly raises additional questions about his temperament and his ability to lead.

In 1900, President Theodore Roosevelt (then governor of New York) wrote in a private letter, “Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.” Roosevelt later described his foreign policy in the face of numerous crises as “the exercise of intelligent forethought and of decisive action sufficiently far in advance of any likely crisis.”

A couple of years ago, my husband and I visited Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota. As a young man, Roosevelt, like Donald Trump, was the son of a wealthy New York family. He sought out this wild landscape in order to establish his own identity and satisfy his spirit of adventure. (I am reminded of Win Rockefeller finding his way to Arkansas and George H. W. Bush lighting out for Texas after World War II.) It was to his cabin in North Dakota that Roosevelt returned for solace after losing his young wife and his mother on the same day in 1884.

I like to think that perhaps the wilderness itself had something to do with Roosevelt’s position of governing and on national security. The bluff or the overreach would have been worth little on the range; either could in fact have been deadly.

This attitude of soft voice but adequacy of preparedness has afforded us much good will and security over the past century and more, even with the darkest questions about our intentions in Vietnam and Iraq.

Yet, in the course of a year, Trump has cost the United States a great deal of that good will, especially in the eyes of our allies and emerging democracies abroad, while continuing to seek to widen the divide between economic and social classes here at home by playing us one against the other. Who goes under the bus first, who gets fired next?

But in this statement he is risking our very lives and those of our children, as well as the lives of innocents abroad.

The party line suggested by Republican hawks this past week that Trump being Trump playing a game of chicken (or button, if you will) is what has brought Kim Jung Un to conversation with South Korea should suggest more about what South Korea thinks of Trump than of North Korea. Clearly, he is a man who cannot be depended on, and he’s got a big button; he told us so. It is time to call Trump’s hand on “the button” before North Korea does.

Yes, we are done.

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