The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Kim Jong Un and Trump: Let them talk
Sixty-eight years ago, with the dust still settling after the conflagration called World War II, this country decided to enter a war in Korea. After a year of fighting, by the summer of 1951, there was a stable stalemate at the 38th parallel.
Two years later, it hardened into an armistice, not a peace treaty. Along the way, some 5 million people perished, including about 36,000 U.S. soldiers. Also along the way, a general named MacArthur was relieved of command, having apparently forgot that he was not actually our commander in chief.
The Korean War did not have the U.S. body count of our war in Vietnam, and it didn’t have anywhere near the impact on the American scene at the time.
However, it never ended. Sure, the shooting stopped at some point, but a war ends when the combatants come home. We came home from Vietnam in 1975. Sixtyeight years after intervening, we’re still in Korea.
This isn’t normal. Wars do happen, but they are supposed to end. Will our grandchildren be stationed in South Korea? How about their grandchildren? What’s the plan?
It is extremely difficult, perhaps impossible, for an American psyche to imagine how things look from North Korea. Try to imagine that a nation thousands of miles away chose to intervene in our local conflict decades ago, and we fought them to a draw, and they never left. Try to picture tens of thousands of troops from this nation, that already invaded us once, massed on one of our borders permanently.
You can’t. It’s too weird. None of this happens to us. Not tomorrow — not ever. The impossibility of this happening to us is naturally ingrained in our national psyche.
Until very recently, there was another unimaginable element. Imagine that the hostile power camped out on the border in their tens of thousands had the ability, any old time, to withdraw those troops and then obliterate this entire nation remotely, without risk to their own homeland. Yikes!
Recently, that has changed. North Korea has now done what I hope and assume we would have done if we actually were in that unimaginable position. We would have wanted a credible deterrent, would we not? Especially if the nation that had the option of nuking us was the one nation on earth that has opted to do that in the past.
Having tested nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic missiles, North Korea seems to have achieved that. However, although a nuclear deterrent against a nuclear foe makes perfect sense theoretically, in the case of North Korea, it is treated as the most dastardly act in international relations since Hitler betrayed Stalin.
And so, earlier this year, we were treated to the sick spectacle of our two leaders, Kim Jung Un and President
Donald Trump, competing in a bellicosity contest, talking about the red buttons they could push any time.
And then, one Olympics later, everything is changed and the shocking news is that these two men are going to meet and talk things over.
Now, I get it that people are nervous about Trump negotiating with Kim. Our Donald is a sucker for a dictator, and he doesn’t know much of anything about international relations. Even so, it has been a little weird hearing people talk about the possibility of this meeting with such alarm. Like things could get worse?
If Trump hits it off with the leader of North Korea, that’s probably better than nuclear brinksmanship. If he is ignorant of, and uninterested in, six decades of foreign policy orthodoxy vis-à-vis North Korea, that’s just as well. It has been six decades of frozen warfare. It has profited us less than nothing, with no end in sight. Let them talk.
Eric Kuhn is a student of government and a graduate of UConn Law School and a Middletown resident. He has lived in Connecticut since the Ford administration.