Wars started by one fool thing
Some damn fool thing in the Balkans.
That is the answer Bismarck gave when he was asked what might spark an uncontrollable military conflict in Europe. Years later his prophecy was realized with tragic implications. Some damn fool thing in the Balkans — in that case, the assassination of Archduke Frank Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, at Sarajevo — began the Great War. It took another generation for that war, which stretched from 1914 to 1918, to require the wide use of an ominous Roman numeral.
Now, some damn fool thing in East Asia, involving some damn fool in Pyongyang, threatens to unleash another war, the most dreaded of all military conflicts, one perhaps involving nuclear weapons and a third set of Roman numerals.
The world shudders — and gropes for historical antecedents. The most obvious one occurred 55 years ago, with the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the two great powers of the time, the Soviet Union and the United States, went eyeball to eyeball — the phrase is attributed to Dean Rusk, the American secretary of state — before Nikita Khrushchev blinked and began the long process of removing nuclear weapons from the island 90 miles from Florida.
But like most comparisons, it is an imperfect one. The two near-combatants of 1962 were superpowers led by rational men, aware of the consequences, knowledgeable about each other — they had met in Vienna more than a year earlier — and respectful of diplomatic norms. The least experienced of the two, the callow American president, had been beaten up at the summit, but, nonetheless, John F. Kennedy knew something about how the world worked. Indeed, while Americans like to quote his “ask not” riff in his eloquent inaugural address, the more relevant phrase may be this one: “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.”
Fortunately, the cooler heads in today’s administration apparently heed the back half of that sentence.
On the broader issues, including the nuclear threat, there is no clear nor easy way ahead. A settlement will require more ingenuity than intuition. And patience.
Everyone knows the differences — and the dangers. Seoul is within a few hours’ marching distance from North Korea, far less by aircraft, and even less by artillery or missile. The threat to Americans, whether in Guam, Alaska or California, is real, if not this summer, then perhaps by this fall. The leaders of North Korea and the United States are armed with nuclear weapons and incendiary rhetoric. The latter is tinder for the former.
President Kennedy distributed Barbara Tuchman’s “The Guns of August” to his top aides so they would understand the danger of rhetorical tinder, along with the peril inherent in alliances that promised Russia to side with Serbia in 1914, while Germany sided with Austria-Hungary and while France acted on its alliance with Russia.
The alliances of 1914 created momentum to destruction. The alliances of 2017 are acting as a brake on destruction. It was South Korean President Moon Jae-in who sought to slow down the march to military force this month. “No one should be allowed to decide on a military action on the Korean Peninsula without South Korean agreement,” he said in a nationally televised speech.
The South Korean president is urging a one-two nonviolent punch of diplomacy and sanctions, a combination that clearly is being pursued by China, which has begun enforcing trade measures that will deprive North Korea of an additional $1 billion — a loss its severely beleaguered economy can hardly bear. Still, planning for harsher measures continues apace.
American and South Korean forces are to begin military exercises in the region within days. These exercises, years in the planning, are not a response to the summer crisis. But they could provide a flashpoint — the “some damn fool” incident — if Kim Jong Un is looking for a provocation.
This time, unlike in 1914, there is plenty of room for both sides — one planning military exercises, the other planning missile tests near Guam — to back away. But one chilling fact remains once the crisis involving the missiles of August recedes. North Korea still will have nuclear weapons and ICBMs powerful enough to make them a formidable threat. It remains the biggest challenge facing President Donald J. Trump, a test of character, resolve and ... the art of the deal.