My Way

“The U.S. has been talking to North Korea, and paying them extortion money, for 25 years.

Talking is not the answer!” Donald Trump Tweet, August 30^th

Is Kim Jong-un playing Donald Trump like a fiddle? Certainly not the most challenging exercise since you get a pretty accurate real-time gauge as to the effectiveness of your efforts: Twitter. Is China angling the United States into a diplomatic solution that serves its own regional purposes? From its expansion of an ever-growing reinforced island (with bunkers and runways) in the Spratly chain to its announced “Asian” sphere of influence, China has worked to undermine America’s mutual defense treaties in the region, particularly with Japan, the Philippines and South Korea.

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is more than happy to show regional nations that their future lies with alignment with China, and that Trump-America is a volatile, unreliable and inconsistent “ally.” The last thing the PRC wants is to watch North Korea collapse, perhaps putting a current U.S. ally, South Korea, on its border. South Korea would be economically slammed if it were to take over the North, a nation of 25 million brainwashed, under-trained people raised on hatred of the United States and the South, with some of the most deeply polluted air, water and soil on earth and some of the least developed infrastructure in the modern world.

Departing Trump senior advisor, alt-right’s Stephen Bannon, issued this dire analysis in an interview with The American Prospect on August 16^th: “There’s no military solution (to North Korea’s nuclear threats), forget it… Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that 10 million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here; they got us.” A U.S. nuclear strike would kill millions with lots of fatal radiation drifting over South Korea and Japan, ultimately to be carried to North America by the Gulf Stream.

Even when it comes to conventional power, not only does North Korea have the largest (by sheer numbers) military on earth – and has been building tunnels under the DMZ for a long time – but it has an estimated 8,000 long-range field artillery pieces, deeply embedded on to the opposing slopes in mountains just north of the border, aimed at Seoul (10 million people and 30 miles from that border) and its surrounding environs (15 million people). The above chart, by stratfor.com, shows the kill zone (deepest red = 98 thousand+ kilograms of high explosives per hour, lightest yellow = minimal artillery reach) of that conventional artillery, capable of killing hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people and decimating massive amounts of expensive infrastructure and buildings. So what are the Trump administration’s plans to deal with this reality?

“The world’s attention has understandably focused on Mr. Trump’s saber-rattling threats against Mr. Kim — most dramatically, his promise to rain ‘fire and fury’ on North Korea if Mr. Kim fired ballistic missiles at United States territory.

“But a meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim, these experts said, could open the door to ratifying North Korea’s nuclear status or scaling back America’s joint military exercises with South Korea. That could sunder American alliances with Japan and South Korea and play to the benefit of China, which has long advocated direct dialogue between Washington and Pyongyang.

“‘What the North Koreans are angling for is to bring the danger and tension to a crescendo, and then to pivot to a peace proposal,’ said Daniel R. Russel, who served until March as the assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs. ‘All of this is focused on pressuring the U.S. to enter direct talks with Kim on his terms. That is the big trap.’

“Previous presidents avoided that trap, Mr. Russel said, even if Bill Clinton briefly contemplated meeting Mr. Kim’s father, Kim Jong-il. But Mr. Trump brings a deal-maker’s swagger to the North Korea issue that his predecessors did not. He has in the past expressed a willingness to sit across a table from the willful young scion of North Korea’s ruling family.

“‘I would speak to him,’ Mr. Trump said during the presidential campaign. ‘I would have no problem speaking to him.’ Last April, he said, ‘If it would be appropriate for me to meet with him, I would absolutely; I would be honored to do it.’…

“Hours after Mr. Trump ruled out talks on Twitter, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis contradicted him. ‘We’re never out of diplomatic solutions,’ he told reporters. In Geneva, Robert A. Wood, the American ambassador to the Conference on Disarmament, said the United States remained open to dialogue. ‘We do not seek to be a threat to the Kim Jong-un regime,’ he said.

“Trying to explain Mr. Trump’s tweet [above], Mr. Wood, who was once the State Department’s acting spokesman, said, ‘What the president is saying is that he doesn’t see talking as solving this problem and part of the reason is that the North is not interested in dialogue.’

“Indeed, Mr. Trump’s sudden hostility to talks appeared to be less a reversal of his previous statements than an expression of frustration with Mr. Kim’s continued belligerence. Days after Mr. Trump praised him for his newfound restraint, Mr. Kim lobbed a missile over Japan.” New York Times, August 30^th.

Where’s Donald’s bro, Vladimir Putin on all this? “Russian President Vladimir Putin warned on Friday [9/1] that the tense standoff between North Korea and the United States was on the verge of large-scale conflict and said it was a mistake to try to pressure Pyongyang over its nuclear missile program… Putin, who is due to attend a summit of the BRICS nations in China next week (2^nd week in September), wrote in an article published on the Kremlin's web site ahead of his trip that he favored negotiations with North Korea instead… ‘It is essential to resolve the region's problems through direct dialog involving all sides without advancing any preconditions (for such talks),’ Putin wrote. Thompson-Reuters, September 1^st. So… what can really be done?

Kim Jong-un clearly does not want to be emolliated in a nuclear holocaust of raining U.S. missiles, the inevitable result of his attempt to attack the United States with one of his nuclear-tipped ICBMs.  He may be mad, but he does not appear to be stupid. Apparently, he is smarter than his American counterpart, knows how to push the envelope and lure Donald Trump into a trap where the U.S. President will give Kim what he wants, please the PRC in the process by undermining American diplomatic relationships in the region… and then declare a Trump-like victory touting his own brilliance in a solution that in reality reduces American credibility and influence in the region.

Are there better answers? Clearly Trump’s most senior cabinet officers think so. For more strategies that we could follow, take a walk back to my August 1^st A Man without a Foreign Policy – Korean Nightmares blog and see.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I shudder as I watch madman Kim Jong-un slowly attach his puppet strings to a sitting U.S. president.