By Robert P. Bomboy
WHOA! You don't poke a
rattlesnake with a stick and expect it to behave like a caged canary.
President
Trump during the past week moved the Doomsday Clock almost to midnight. His
end-of-the-world threats against North Korea, his ruthless pragmatism, manipulation,
and braggadocio
drove us into the most dangerous game of Russian roulette since the Cuban
Missile Crisis when, even in the Kennedy White House, no one knew if our next
day would be our last.
Trump vowed to kill millions and
inflict the worst human catastrophe in living memory if North Korea were to so
much as threaten the United States. "North Korea best not make any more
threats to the United States," he blustered from his golf club. "They
will be met with fire, fury, and frankly power, the likes of which this world
has never seen before."
Then, like a schoolyard bully he came back again with a taunt that he
"might not have been harsh enough."
Since his inauguration in January,
Trump has said repeatedly he might be willing to use military force against
North Korea, even if it inflicted the worst human catastrophe in living memory.
The South Carolina Republican, Senator Lindsey Graham, said Trump told him to
his face last week, "If thousands die, they're going to die over there,
they're not going to die here."
Trump is not original. Anyone who had lived through the
daily terror and anxiety of "mutually assured nuclear annihilation,"
as I did in the 1950s, was aghast at Trump's baldfaced threat. No president has
used those words since the almost equally impetuous Harry Truman, who
threatened the Japanese after dropping the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima,
saying they could expect "a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which
has never been seen on this earth."
Three days later, on August 9, 1945,
the U.S. dropped its second atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki - the
last to be used on human beings. Nagasaki had the biggest Catholic and
Christian population in Japan, and ground zero for the annihilation of 70,000
men, women, and children was the city's largest Roman Catholic cathedral.
“It’s
hard to think of a president using more extreme language during a crisis like
this,” said the presidential historian Michael Beschloss. “Presidents usually
try to use language that is even more moderate than what they may be feeling in
private, because they’ve always been worried that their language might escalate
a crisis.”
If our attacks killed millions,
other, much larger and more powerful nuclear nations like Russia and China,
could well see us as a pariah and seek to destroy us as a murderous criminal -
provoking a thermonuclear world war that would ultimately kill everyone and
everything on earth.
Ordinary people seem divorced from
this reality: The priest in my church on Sunday talked mostly about the riots
last week in Charlottesville, Virginia, and their three fatalities. In my local
newspaper an 80-year-old woman wrote about the idyllic scenes she remembered in
the 1940s on the front porch of her grandmother's house.
Again, like a schoolyard bully standing over a little guy,
Trump has pitted himself against North Korea's Kim Jong Un, taunting Kim to
threaten him face to face. Yet Kim Jong Un virtually never speaks directly
except once a year in New Years' statements (He has now said he will pause and
wait on plans to shoot dummy missiles to 24 miles outside Guam's territorial
waters.) The North Korean government over the years has fired off volley after
verbal volley of threats and insults against us, without carrying out even one.
Long before it was testing intercontinental missiles it was threatening to
"annihilate U.S. imperialist aggressors," to bomb Texas, Hawaii, and
Los Angeles.
In some ways, perhaps, the North
Koreans are like the American Indians who, when they first met white settlers,
were playing a game called "counting coup" - a game in which one
Indian would strike another Indian with a stick and "count coup."
Any blow struck
against the enemy counted as a coup, but the most prestigious acts included
touching an enemy warrior with a hand, a bow, or with a coup stick - then
escaping unharmed. Touching the enemy's defensive works also counted as coup.
To our sorrow, many times repeated,
we don 't understand the Asian mind or doctrines. Recognize that North
Korea is still living in its stalemated Korean War of the 1950s. The North Koreans have "counted
coup" against us again and again since then.
Nevertheless, Donald Trump in the
past week backed himself into a corner playing chicken. It's frightening to
think what he might do.
It's possible also to wonder about
ulterior motives.
Sometimes fiction is stranger, and
more prescient even, than reality. Millions of us have watched the Netflix
television drama House of Cards. In the last scene of the 2016 season,
with scandals and prosecutions closing in from every side, the corrupt and
actually murderous Frank Underwood, who usurped the presidency from his
predecessor, creates a world of chaos to divert attention from his situation.
As president, Underwood orders the U.S. military to combat global terrorism,
regardless of the cost. "We don't submit to terror. We make the
terror," President Underwood says.
"The lower Trump's poll
numbers, the more outlandish his lies, the greater the resistance from
opponents within the bureaucracies, the thicker his scandals and chaos,"
predicts Mark Danner, the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and
the Humanities at Bard College. "The likelier he will be to use a crisis
and all the opportunities it offers to lever himself from a position of
defensiveness to that of dominating power."
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