Merely four days into President Trump’s seventeen-day vacation at his Bedminster, New Jersey golf course, a crisis in the far-East has ignited. It’s a crisis, doubtless, and it deserves our sober attention, but it’s a rather familiar one that has for decades summarized our relationship with North Korea in general and the Kim regime in particular. Our shared history with the North Korean state, benighted, despotic, and consequently wretched as it is, is one defined by ceaseless unease, intermittent tumult, and the ever-present knowledge that a crisis will most inevitably recrudesce. It’s a history that has for the past three decades festered and turned rank as the two nations distance themselves ever further apart. Further still, shall they accelerate toward their respective sides in the wake of that which President Trump had to say.
The president is on an August holiday from this week until next, as the White House undergoes renovation. Sturdy and symbolic though she is, we mustn’t forget that our adored White House is two-centuries old, and that the house in which Adams did first live might be in need of a modernizing influence. That said, these next weeks were supposed to be languid, dog-days-of-summer. They were supposed to be quiescent and tranquil. They were to be slow, as are all steamy August days expected, and they were to bring respite to this administration’s incessant controversies and squabbles. President Trump was to enjoy a soporific, indulgent, golf-crazed trip.
All promises of tranquility and of rest were bludgeoned with a rousing hand when The Washington Post reported that North Korea had achieved a significant development in its goal to usher in its long-sought nuclear age. Should the report reflect the truth on the ground, it seems as though North Korea has achieved “miniaturizing” of its nascent nuclear warheads. Mind you, as most things miniature are inherently cute, this is nothing of the sort. The fact that the warhead has been made small is not to say it’s been made any less baneful or potent. Nor is it to say there is a diminution of its potentially deadly impact. It remains a missile, scaled-down in size, yes, but all the more capable of destruction on an indiscriminate and apocalyptic scale. Being that it’s small, the miniaturized nuclear warhead can be more easily attached to an Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile, or ICBM. This, in essence, makes the bomb incredibly more agile, which makes it more discrete in movement, which finally makes it more efficient and deadly once launched.
The Post obtained this unnerving information from a classified Defense Intelligence Agency report. The report was published days after the U.N. Security Council agreed to impart new sanctions on the Hermit Kingdom and its increasing bellicosity. Even China, to whom North Korea has been shamelessly dependent, agreed to sign on to the council’s decision. In its effect (if indeed it is effectuated, assuming China can commit to it) the sanction would have in its word and deed a severity, unanimity, and resolution unseen in recent years. That said, so far as we can concern ourselves with China, our trust might be better placed in an ally who has proven itself more consistently ideologically opposed to Kim Jong Un’s totalitarian regime. China’s newfound fidelity to cause is suspect, and we ought to take it with a grain of salt.
China in recent years has benefitted from North Korea’s paltry lead and coal ore exports, but the former’s support for the latter is best explained at the level of an existential urge to preserve a like-minded and self-same friend. Since the Korean War’s armistice in 1953, China (and Russia, to a lesser extent) has provided unmitigated and unrequited succor to the Kim kakistocracy. China sees in this misanthropic Manchurian dynasty the dying breath of an ailing Communist friend. China helped to create it, strained to sustain it, and now endures it. It’s because of this that North Korea became what it is today—a totalitarian bastion and an eremitic propaganda state for which China is largely responsible. The eastern hemisphere’s and, by extension, the world’s stability now depends on China owning this fact and rectifying its neighbor’s its tributary state’s waywardness.
For some odd reason, perhaps as a matter of propriety, of comity, or of simply not wanting to ruffle feathers of our largest international partner in trade, China’s role in this North Korean is seldom acknowledged. As alluded to, the reason for this could just be economic. The trepidation of our leaders to call out China and the way in which it responds with refractoriness to North Korea’s breaches of conduct might be best explained by the bottom line. Economically, there is much to lose should our trading partnership, however unequal as our politicians claim it to be, sour. It’s not only the world’s most populous country, but China is America’s most important foreign market.
The Trump administration knows this, as have all administrations past (at least from the time of Bush till Obama), but unlike the previous political leaders of old, Trump hasn’t shied away from reminding the international community of China’s culpability in this mess. In this case, and perhaps this case alone, Trump has been justified in hurling opprobrium in China’s direction.
When President Trump scolds China for manipulating its currency or when he suggests that it has a role in propagating the “hoax” that is climate change, he is doing one of three things: misdirecting his frustrations, misunderstanding the issues, or misleading the American people. The three, you’ll note, are listed in descending order of veniality. On the matter of North Korea, however, and as it pertains to China’s role therein, he has been right on the money. He’s been right to call out the Chinese government and remind it of its ineluctable complicity. He correctly diagnosed that “if China wants to solve the North Korea problem, they will” and placed blame on them for doing “nothing for us with North Korea, just talking”. It’s absolutely irrefutable that China must—if we are as a world to de-escalate this intractable problem in North Korea—intervene with more immediacy and with greater resolve. They must lead the way. Only they can set straight North Korea’s deviant course. America is but a failing west wind; she’s a sweet and constant zephyr, but an altogether unsuccessful one in dealing with the Kim regime. China must fill the gaps in which America has failed.
But, at the end of the day, China will do what it wants, while America will do what she must. And, for those impatient among us, we will soon discover exactly what that means and what that might be. President Trump responded to the report of North Korea’s nuclear warhead development with one of those immediately historic statements of history. North Korea, said he, will be “met with fire and fury, and frankly, power the likes of which this world has never seen before”. Not quite unlike that which the world has never seen before, as Truman made a similarly foreboding pledge in talking about Little Boy and Fat Man. But it’s the phrase, fire and fury that, in the minds of Americans and in the memories of all civilized peoples of the world, has reverberated and stuck. It’s a dysphemism; it makes what would be a nuclear holocaust and an internecine war. More accustomed are our increasingly effeminate American ears to phrases like “measured responses”, and “commensurate replies” than to a phrase like fire and fury.
But, President Trump cares little for such linguistic niceties, subtleties, or euphemisms. He’s quick to indulge listeners with inflated hyperbole and, thus far, it’s an indulgence that has succeeded in his businesses and politics. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but when dealing with nuclear warfare, I’d rather the phraseology be a bit more precise. “Fire and fury” are within the imagination’s macabre scope, but “the likes of which this world has never seen” is necessarily beyond. Truman said it in a pre-nuclear age. He said it at the dusk of Potsdam and the dawn of tomorrow. Worse than Hiroshima and worse than Nagasaki, the mind simply cannot muse.
Many have wondered why the president chose this fire and fury line instead of something, how shall we say, a bit more anodyne. His administration claims it to have been his own extemporaneous response. Likely, it was. If so, this gives us a unique view of the president’s unscripted spontaneity. And, to put it mildly, it’s bit frightening to behold. The day he uttered fire and fury could be another day that lives in infamy.
Recent Comments