COHEN U.S. war with North Korea is a real danger

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Ignore the diversions in the United States: athletes kneeling or standing during the national anthem; Republicans flailing and failing again on health care; a kick-boxing creationist possibly becoming senator from Alabama. Calamity looms elsewhere.

We are hurtling toward war with North Korea. It may be as early as next month. It may not be deliberate. It may be what no one wants or expects. It may be mischance, misperception and misfortune.

With each day of threats and cries from leaders on both sides, it becomes more likely. One-upmanship does that. Former admiral James Stavridis, who heads the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, says the chances of a conventional war are 50-50 and nuclear war 10 per cent. That’s probably too low; the prospects of nuclear war today are the greatest since the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, the closest we have ever come to Armageddon.

Wars often start as a succession of irreversible incidents. A runaway train of events. A clash of vanity, honour, affront, anger, anxiety, revenge, stupidity. Soon we are in a narrow place with few options.

Since 1945, we have assumed that those who had the bomb were rational. We might find their rhetoric shrill, coarse, silly or messianic, but they were rational.

Are Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un rational? Who knows? Their behaviour suggests they are sophomoric, temperamental, impulsive, even unhinged.

We know little of Kim. We like to think he is rational, that he loves the authority that his totalitarian state gives him. That means his strongest instinct is to survive.

So, he imprisons his enemies, kills his uncle and others, creates a cult of personality and develops nuclear weapons as a means to ward off any threat to the status quo.

He makes threats, calls Trump names and orders raids or incursions below the 38th parallel, as his predecessors did. They are ignored because South Korea and the United States do not think it in their strategic interest to respond to provocation. That would only escalate things.

We could live with an irrational dictator in Pyongyang if he faced a rational president in Washington. For years he did. Don’t be so sure anymore.

Now, in a breathtaking fusillade of insults, epithets and threats, the commander-in-chief uses the same rhetoric that Kim does. His platform is Twitter. Or, worse, the United Nations.

This has never happened. No one in the nuclear age in the Oval Office has talked like Donald Trump. No one with nuclear missiles has threatened “fire and fury,” to “totally destroy ” North Korea, or has warned its leadership they may “not be around much longer.” Or called his opponent “little rocket man.”

No wonder, then, that the North Koreans threaten more nuclear tests in the Pacific. Or claim the Americans have made “a declaration of war,” which allows them to shoot down U.S. planes in international air space. This is what happens when boys rub sand in each other’s face in the sandbox. Anything becomes a casus belli.

Trump, we know, has no filter; there is little he will not say. Apologists such as Conrad Black coolly predict that Trump will pre-emptively take out North Korea’s heavy artillery batteries on the border before they rain down on Seoul. He will also take out its nuclear installations, though experts say those are too diffuse to find them all.

Field Commander Black seems to relish this. Only the shiver sisters, Nervous Nellies and Cassandras, he suggests, deny that Trump will be able to swat down the North Koreans.

My God, it has come to this: a naive, blithe confidence that the United States can hit first and get away with it. It can’t. The moment Kim sees that he will lose everything, he will go nuclear.

Saddam Hussein was not thought “suicidal” either before the Iraq War. But he ended up effectively committing suicide and destroying himself and his regime.

Kim Jong Un may well commit suicide, too, assisted by Donald Trump. Where it stops, no one knows.