An ill-considered tweet is no reason to go to war
Knowing what you knew of candidate Donald Trump a year ago, you might have imagined this nightmare headline: “North Korea Says Trump’s Tweets Are a Declaration of War.” Well, your national nightmare is here. That headline comes from Vanity Fair, but is one of hundreds just like it that raced around the internet earlier this week.
A president who doesn’t read; who has no grasp of history, no knowledge of foreign affairs and no capacity for statesmanship; and who never served in the military, and diligently evaded his own generation’s war, is practicing gunboat diplomacy in 140 characters.
On Saturday night, Trump tweeted out, “Just heard Foreign Minister of North Korea speak at U.N. If he echoes thoughts of Little Rocket Man, they won’t be around much longer!”
Before you cheer the bravado, as 133,000 Twitter readers did by clicking “Like,” you should know that “Little Rocket Man,” whom Trump so casually threatens to dispatch, commands the fourth-largest army in the world.
He may have the face of a cherub and eccentric hair, but Kim Jong Un is a monster with hydrogen bombs. He is a nuclear threat in the Asia-Pacific and is developing ICBMs that could one day target Los Angeles or Chicago.
He is no one to toy with. This is not child’s play.
A conflict on the Korean Peninsula would be “catastrophic,” said U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who added North Korea is “the most urgent and dangerous threat to peace and security.”
Laugh if you will at Kim, as Trump appears to do on social media, but the stakes in lives are enormously high. Twenty-five million people live in metro Seoul, South Korea.
North Korea has long threatened, if provoked, to turn that city into a “sea of fire” with thousands of artillery tubes aimed southward.
Estimates say such a barrage could kill a million South Koreans.
In his statement before the United Nations and in his tweets, Trump has explicitly said he would “utterly destroy” North Korea and implied he would kill that nation’s leadership.
Those are provocative words that can lead to miscalculation in Pyongyang, writes longtime foreign-policy hand Joseph M. DeThomas in the journal 38 North.
A Penn State professor who was a U.S. ambassador to Estonia and served for decades in the U.S. Foreign Service and the State Department, DeThomas writes, “(Trump) has cornered a vicious animal and told it he intends to kill it and its young. His announcement last week of far-reaching secondary economic sanctions designed to unilaterally impose a complete trade and financial embargo on North Korea is likely to pour gasoline on the fire he set in New York.”
The days of gentle negotiations with the North Koreans may be over, given their eager pursuit of thermonuclear bombs that can obliterate American cities, but we Americans need to wake up to the stakes here.
DeThomas reprised the famous quote of Sir Edward Grey on the eve of World War I. The British foreign secretary said of the darkness then descending on humanity, “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”
The headline on DeThomas’ piece is “The lamps are going out in Asia,” and in it, he compares Trump to Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II, whose foolish communiques helped set in motion a world war that killed nearly 20 million people.
“Trump shares one common and dangerous trait with the Kaiser,” writes DeThomas. “Both were amateur militarists given to public bluster and adopting an ultra-nationalist bully-boy style of diplomacy, in part to cover up vast weaknesses in their own characters and their lack of understanding of their countries’ true strengths. But neither of these individuals intended to unleash catastrophe.”
How close are we to catastrophe? If Kim decides the Americans are going to invade, he may try to pre-empt us with a land invasion of South Korea. If that happens, nearly 30,000 U.S. military personnel will be militarily engaged. The United States will be at war.
If history has taught us anything, it is that war is a descent into darkness that is thoroughly unpredictable.
Donald Trump’s ignorance and impulsiveness are not suited for such high-stakes diplomacy. At this moment in time, we are stuck with the commander in chief we elected, but we can only hope that more seasoned minds around him will hedge him in and stop his worst impulses.
No one should die, and no nation should go to war, because of one foolish and ill-considered tweet.
No one should die, and no nation should go to war, because of one foolish and ill-considered tweet.