Donald Trump’s fiery rhetoric on North Korea courts disaster

President Donald Trump’s habit of using Twitter and interviews to jab at his political adversaries or at fellow Republicans he finds wanting has never seemed close to constructive. Trump’s contempt for political norms certainly helped get him elected and probably still pleases his millions of followers. But since he took office in January, it’s difficult to find a single issue where Trump’s combativeness, especially on Twitter, has paid much of a dividend.

Now Trump’s default instinct to escalate confrontations with those who oppose him threatens disaster. His week of swapping potshots with nuclear-armed North Korea so unnerved the world that its stocks tumbled nearly $1 trillion. Yet Trump didn’t stop. Friday, he warned Pyongyang it would “regret it fast” if it makes one more threat against Guam, the Pacific island that is a U.S. territory.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, among others, depicts North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un as rational and conventionally motivated — as trying to leverage his nation’s nuclear arsenal and improved missile technology into significant concessions from the United States, South Korea and Pyongyang’s other neighbors. But in 2015, a United Nations Security Council diplomat compared Kim to “a crazed 5-year-old” in a profile in The New Yorker that dubbed him a “dangerously erratic young man.”

Of course, Trump himself has also proven erratic, if not dangerously so, at least yet. The idea that a machismo-laced rhetorical squabble between two erratic men could escalate into violence is hardly far-fetched. While East Asia foreign policy expert Frank Jannuzi is among those who sees Kim as rational, he said earlier this year that he believes the only chance that North Korea would launch a suicidal attack against the United States was if Kim feared a pre-emptive attack against him — an unlikely scenario that Trump has stunningly made seem less than impossible in recent days.

Even after North Korea’s successful recent tests, there are still reasons to wonder whether it would be able to hit the U.S. with a nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile, so it’s possible to believe that the United States might escape a war with little damage. But it is difficult to imagine a scenario in which hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of South Koreans don’t perish in such a conflict. The carnage wouldn’t even necessarily come from nuclear weapons. Nearly half of the U.S. ally’s 51 million people live within 50 miles of the North Korean borders, where Kim has stationed up to 8,000 rocket launchers and artillery cannons able to launch up to 300,000 rounds within the first hour of a war. This is why containment of the Pyongyang nuclear threat remains by far the best U.S. option.

On Friday, another nuclear-armed superpower took a constructive course to try to de-escalate tensions. China used its state-owned newspaper to warn North Korea that it would be on its own if it attacked the United States and to say, although the nature of the support wasn’t specified, that Beijing would support North Korea if the U.S. attacked.

This may help persuade Pyongyang to stand down. Americans need someone — anyone — to get President Trump to stand down. The world suddenly feels like it is in a far more dangerous place.

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