President Trump’s imaginary ”armada” – a description that suggests a certain historical illiteracy – has set the stage for a genuine military confrontation with North Korea. While the new administration blusters its way into another international crisis, its incompetent diplomacy is toying with a regime that has been on a war footing for decades. In 1969 the Nixon administration chose to forgo even a symbolic strike against North Korea, after it downed a US Navy plane with the loss of 31 lives, because the risk of triggering another Korean war seemed too great. Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons, and the prospect of its paranoid leader risking a preemptive strike, make the current situation far more precarious but the Trump White House seems hopelessly adrift not only in terms of a larger strategy, but even in its awareness of basic facts on the ground.
It is not clear what Trump was thinking when he told President Xi Jinping, that “not only are there aircraft carriers, we have the nuclear subs, which you have to let [Kim Jong-un] know.” Chinese military intelligence would have known that this was a bluff and advised their North Korean counterparts accordingly. As with the airstrike in Syria and the MOAB in Afghanistan, Trump seems to have been more concerned with the appearance of US force than its actual strategic use, but even this game of rhetorical one-upmanship is perilous. Washington should not forget, as the New Yorker writer Amy Davidson has observed, that “it is dealing with a regime whose capacity for self-deceiving self-aggrandizement exceeds its own.” When Republican hawks like former Bush ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, say that the “way to end North Korea’s weapons program is to end North Korea” they should remind themselves that a statement like that is taken both literally and seriously by the supreme leader in Pyongyang.
Trump’s sudden reversals have already become a hallmark of his presidency. Within this month alone, he stopped dismissing NATO, and embraced it; he denied that China was manipulating currency; he endorsed the current Chair of the Federal Reserve after threatening to get rid of her; he offered China better trading terms after campaigning stridently against trade deficits; he condemned Putin for his support of Assad; he scrapped, at least temporarily, his plans for tax reform, and he distanced himself, with his customary ill-grace, from chief strategist Steven Bannon. Whether these turnarounds are seen, domestically, as a sign of growth on the job or evidence of disorderly governance, they have been taken for weakness abroad. Confronted with an indecisive and blustering leader, North Korea is likely to press its perceived advantage.
Candidate Trump spoke repeatedly of the need for the US to stop being predictable in its military operations – to stop letting the enemy know what was going to happen next. The problem with such armchair quarterbacking is that it assumes that military manoeuvres are orchestrated by leaders with a firm grasp of the facts. Not only has Trump’s initial moves undermined confidence within South Korea, it has called attention to his inexperience and lack of preparation for the crisis. Setting aside the president’s ever-intruding ego, his government is still noticeably under-resourced in all of the countries that hold the key to a diplomatic resolution of this crisis. To date the US has not named a new ambassador to Japan or South Korea, nor has its pick for China been confirmed by the Senate, and the State Department has yet to appoint a new assistant secretary for Asian and Pacific affairs.
Gen. Rob Givens, a US veteran who fought in the Korean War and then served in South Korea as a Deputy Assistant Chief of Staff for Operations U.S. Forces has written that a shooting war in the Korean Peninsula would quickly escalate into a total conflict and “involve millions of troops, thousands of pieces of artillery and missiles, hundreds of aircraft and ships, and, cost tens of thousands of casualties and untold amounts of treasure.” He adds that “it won’t look anything like any of the wars we have fought in the past 30 years. Its scope, intensity, duration, and, of course, casualties will be at a level the world hasn’t seen for a very long time.” In other words, this is a moment for statesmanship and diplomacy, not the mindless sabre-rattling that Washington has engaged in so far.
