WHEN MY EYES BEHELD AN EERIE SIGHT
When the Cuban Missile Crisis was going on, I wasn’t paying attention. I was 15 at the time, and I remember the popular music of mid-October, 1962, with great clarity. But the whole “brink of World War III” thing? Not so much. Respect to Bobby “Boris” Pickett, the Crypt-Kicker Five, and “Monster Mash” – in memory yet green.
But since then, I’ve read some history. There are commentators on the right who hope to dignify the name-calling going on between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un (two men with bad haircuts who owe their current jobs to their respective fathers) by comparing it to the Cuban Missile Crisis. I beg to differ. The most important difference between then and now is that in 1962, there were adults in the room.
Kennedy and Khrushchev ratcheted up the tension to a dangerous level, but after a rational cost-benefit analysis, both sides backed down. The USSR pulled its (largely symbolic) missiles out of Cuba in return for Kennedy’s promise that we’d stop trying to invade Cuba and dismantle American nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey. Done and done, and no World War III.
Trump has lost face at home over the Obamacare fiasco, and he’s been backed into a corner by Robert Mueller. In Trump’s mind, the only thing to do under those circumstances is change the subject. So he blurted out some nonsense about “fire and fury,” much to the surprise of his military advisors, who began immediately to distance America’s foreign policy from the blathering of its commander in chief.
Of course, Kim Jong-un double dared Trump to back up his talk. Thus far, Trump has responded with his usual bluster – “maybe fire and fury wasn’t tough enough” – but so far he hasn’t done anything. My fervent hope is that the Generals – Kelly, Mattis, and McMaster – will band together and stop him from starting a nuclear war.
North Korea has been an unsolvable puzzle for Democratic and Republican presidents alike. The Kim dynasty’s apparent craziness is different from Trump’s combination of narcissism and dementia. Three generations of Kims have made North Korea into a fourth world country that just happens to have nuclear weapons.
In 1969, Richard Nixon was tempted to attack NK but dropped the idea because there were too many downsides, even if we “won” the war. Kim wouldn’t go down without a fight. Seoul, population 10 million, is only 35 miles south of the border between the two countries. That’s well within artillery range, even if Kim refrains from using nuclear weapons. With or without nukes, NK has the capacity to inflict millions of deaths on South Korea, including some of the 150,000 plus American civilian and military personnel living in or near Seoul.
North Korea is so poor that the entire country of 22 million people is on the verge of starvation right now. Any disruption of their infrastructure would result in millions of civilian deaths north of the DMZ. As Colin Powell said prophetically before the Iraq War, “If you break it, you own it.”
Instead of bragging about how tough he is, Mr. Art of the Deal should be asking his experts what North Korea wants. My guess is that they want us to promise not to attack them (the one similarity to Cuba in 1962) and to show them a little respect. As an alternative to World War III, that doesn’t seem like too high a price to pay.
Hillary Clinton called it last summer. “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.”
Here’s a link to an article in The Federalist (a conservative website) that reviews some of the difficulties war planners deal with when they contemplate an attack on a small country with nuclear capabilities.