On Tuesday, Donald Trump drew a double underline beneath the phrase Apocalyptic rhetoric.
“North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States ” … “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”
Though many were quick to call Donald Trump’s rhetoric unprecedented. It’s not. Unfortunately.
Mr. Trump’s menacing remarks echoed the tone and cadence of President Harry S. Truman, who, in a 1945 address announcing that the United States had dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, urged the Japanese to surrender, warning that if they did not, “they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.”
It’s unclear if the historical echo was intentional. If it was, it would imply that Donald Trump was consciously mimicking an address that happened in the midst of a hot war at a time when the United States had already deployed a nuclear weapon. It would also imply that Trump knows some history.
And for those who were worried that the situation was lacking in scary comparisons …
Trump’s Wednesday morning tweets emphasized that he’s been applying a dishrag to American nosecones.
Actually, the memo regarding modernizing the nuclear arsenal was Trump’s fourteenth order. And exactly no change has occurred between where President Obama left the arsenal, and where it is now.
Other officials are attempting to fight back Trump’s flames and put a slightly less Strangelove spin on the situation, but the leader of American golf courses is already having an effect on world markets.
On Wednesday, in the hours after President’s Trump’s threat to unleash “fire and fury” on North Korea if it continued to menace the United States, global investors sold the dollar. The same dynamic played out in June, as Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations imposed an embargo on Qatar, delivering a fraught crisis to the oil-rich Persian Gulf. And the dollar dipped in July after President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia expelled 755 American diplomats, ratcheting up tensions between the two nuclear powers.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is widely regarded as a strutting martinet who watches his people starve as he indulges his appetite for smuggled-in luxuries; an egotistical gasbag who loves parades, silly uniforms, and his role as god-king of a crumbling nation more than he loves any, or all, of its citizens. Which is exactly true.
Naturally, Kim followed up Trump’s remarks with a few of his own.
Undaunted, North Korea warned several hours later that it was considering a strike that would create “an enveloping fire” around Guam, the western Pacific island where the United States operates a critical Air Force base. In recent months, American strategic bombers from Guam’s Andersen Air Force Base have flown over the Korean Peninsula in a show of force.
But if Kim is an idiot, he’s an idiot who has been able to watch his fellow gold-braided despots lose both their kingdoms and their lives. Prime example: Saddam Hussein. The biggest reason for Kim’s nukes, is simply that Saddam didn’t have any.
North Korea is a nation with a leader who views any disruption of his own power as an existential threat to the nation. A leader who richly deserves the term tyrant if not madman. But for Kim’s threats to become more than threats, it takes more than a single madman. Unfortunately, we seem to have a matched set.
Kim’s rhetoric is designed mainly for a North Korean audience — which have for generations been told that the Korean War was actually an unprovoked US invasion of the peninsula against which only the North was able to hold. Trump’s remarks are intended for an audience of … that’s not clear.
If Trump is only indulging his inability to let any remark slide past without a nastier counterattack, then perhaps the conflict will remain at the level of harsh words, and the only victims will be … every American whose net worth is trimmed by the flight from the dollar.
But the bigger threat is that Trump will go past words.
There are thousands of nuclear weapons already aimed at the United States, many of which are orders of magnitude more powerful than anything North Korea can build, are mounted on missiles with more range and accuracy than anything North Korea can build, and have been pointed at American cities for decades. The idea that North Korea has a nuclear weapon is unsettling, but no matter how many times the label “mad man” is tossed at Kim Jong Un (or his predecessors) the equation for North Korea is little different than it is for any other country with a nuclear arsenal — fire a weapon and find yourself on the receiving end of unsurvivable retaliation.
The worry is that Trump will think such an exchange isn’t just survivable, but can be won.