I am not going to say much here, but the latest bluster by 45 seems like something we’d expect from North Korea’s current dictator. North Korea’s nuclear program has, it appears, advanced considerably. Lately we’ve noticed an escalation of threatening rhetoric by Kim around the time of the most recent economic sanctions approved by the UN Security Council.
Under saner circumstances, with a saner White House occupant, we’d expect a measured response to the most recent news that the North Korean regime could be closer to having the capacity to launch nuclear warheads that could reach the US. What we experienced today was far from a measured response, but rather an escalation of a war of words. As I try to digest today’s news, I am reminded that 45 on the campaign trail made statements suggesting he was cool with using our nuclear capacity in wartime. I don’t know how seriously his remarks were taken at the time. I would suggest taking him seriously. Whether or not the Joint Chiefs of Staff can keep this loon on a short leash at a particularly delicate moment is unclear. As is said in the news biz, developing….
on what is going on between the US and North Korea. Included in that is a video of a Tim Russert interview with 45, suggesting that 45 has learned nothing in 18 years. Some pushback by other US leaders. Now that the man-child has escalated things, how to de-escalate? Crikey!
We are so screwed. The world is so screwed. Neither one of those egomaniacs, Kim and Trump, knows how to deescalate; they both live in their little bubble of sycophancy where they can do no wrong.
The biggest question is, how likely is it that the Pentagon will refuse to hurl us into catastrophe? Never mind nuking NK; just a few orgiastic airstrikes by us on NK and Seoul will be smoking rubble and the world economy will collapse.
Get past the raw human toll (which would be tremendous), and yeah, there is good reason to expect that the global economy would be badly disrupted. Damage to South Korean industrial cities would cause shortages of a number of goods (electronics, automobiles, etc.), and a war would impact China’s shipping routes. There’s a reason the equities markets have been volatile today. Of course the human toll will be awful, as a war started by the two idiots (in NK and in US White House) would lead inevitably to a refugee crisis that I seriously doubt the Chinese or South Korean governments would be in a position to handle (the latter in particular to the extent that there is sustained damage and casualties as the Kim regime targets South Korea). Globally, the US would end up with an enduring pariah reputation as enough Americans voted to put the narcissist dictator in office and would be viewed as in some sense responsible for the carnage. I honestly don’t know how a nation would come back from that – certainly not in the near term.
Probably nothing, but somebody has to stop that herediatary madman over there. Shooting one’s mouth off about it isn’t a good idea. China won’t rein them in. Why? Consider this:
What if Alaska was another country, dependent on the USA for everything. Consider a history in which we fought Russia over Alaska. If Alaska had a hereditary dictator with a family history of insanity and was working on a nuclear bomb and just launched an ICBM and threatened Russia with it. What would we do? I think we would pull a coup. We wouldn’t want that nut with nukes on our doorstep. And we wouldn’t like a nuclear war with both Alaska and the USA lobbing nukes. If the Russian President asked us to rein in Alaska, wouldn’t we?
There is more going on here than meets the eye.