As noted in some previous posts, I have not worried as much about the possibility of nuclear war since the 1960's as I do now. Again, as previously mote, back then we had sane individuals in the White House. Such is not the case today when we are faced with the daily specter of a petulant, narcissistic, intellectually lazy, ego driven bully in the Oval Office with the nuclear codes. I fear what madness this madman may unleash on the world. Now, Senator Lindsey Graham - a sometimes responsible Republican - has noted that he believes there is a 70% chance that Der Trumpenführer may launch a war with North Korea with likely little thought of the extended consequences to allies in the far east or America itself. When will Pence - himself a vile man - and the cabinet move to remove Trump? All of us are in daily danger from the ill-advised voted of roughly 70,000 individuals in three states. The Atlantic looks at the danger we face. Here are highlights:
It’s become a grim ritual in Washington foreign-policy circles to assess the chances that the United States and North Korea stumble into war. But on Wednesday Lindsey Graham did something different: He estimated the odds that the Trump administration deliberately strikes North Korea first, to stop it from acquiring the capability to target the U.S. mainland with a long-range, nuclear-tipped missile. And the senator’s numbers were remarkably high.“I would say there’s a three in 10 chance we use the military option,” Graham predicted in an interview. If the North Koreans conduct an additional test of a nuclear bomb—their seventh—“I would say 70 percent.”
Graham said that the issue of North Korea came up during a round of golf he played with the president on Sunday. “It comes up all the time,” he said.
“War with North Korea is an all-out war against the regime,” he said. “There is no surgical strike option. Their [nuclear-weapons] program is too redundant, it’s too hardened, and you gotta assume the worst, not the best. So if you ever use the military option, it’s not to just neutralize their nuclear facilities—you gotta be willing to take the regime completely down.”
“We’re not to the tipping point yet,” he noted, but “if they test another [nuclear] weapon, then all bets are off.”
Graham takes the possibility of war seriously enough that, to prevent it, he would support direct talks with the regime “without a whole lot of preconditions.” It was a noteworthy statement coming from one of the foremost North Korea hawks in Congress. He wouldn’t rule out a Kim-Trump summit. “I’m not taking anything off the table to avoid a war. ... When they write the history of the times, I don’t want them to say, ‘Hey, Lindsey Graham wouldn’t even talk to the guy.’”
Graham says Trump “has 100 percent made up his mind that he’s not gonna let Kim Jong Un break out,” which Graham defined as achieving the capacity to “marry up a missile and a nuclear warhead that can hit America effectively.”
Many experts think North Korea has essentially reached this milestone already through its increasingly sophisticated nuclear and missile tests, while others argue that the North is still months or years away from that goal. But Graham bypassed these technical debates to focus on a central tension in the Trump administration’s approach to the issue: The Kim regime is sprinting toward breakout, while the Trump administration’s diplomatic campaign to persuade China and other countries to impose stiffer sanctions and other forms of pressure on North Korea is moving forward, but slowly. It’s a race. And there’s currently a clear frontrunner.
“I don’t know how to say it any more direct: If nothing changes, Trump’s gonna have to use the military option, because time is running out,” Graham said. “I don’t care if North Korea becomes a Chinese protectorate. … I don’t care who [the Chinese] put in charge of North Korea, as long as that person doesn’t want to create a massive nuclear arsenal to threaten America. There are a couple ways for this to end: The Chinese could kill the guy if they wanted to, or they could just stop oil shipments [to North Korea], which would bring [Kim Jong Un’s] economy to [its] knees.” Graham’s scenarios for resolving the crisis short of war, along with his vision for war, notably conclude with regime change in North Korea, which the Trump administration claims to not be pursuing.
Graham walked me through the case he had made for denial—and how he justified the dark calculation it relies on: that it’s worth initiating an actual conflict on the Korean peninsula, placing thousands and maybe even millions of real lives at risk in East Asia, in order to avert the potential deaths of Americans from hypothetical threats. Of the type of “preventive” war Graham has in mind, Dwight Eisenhower once observed, “none has yet explained how war prevents war. Worse than this, no one has been able to explain away the fact that war creates the conditions that beget war.” But Graham has a ready explanation. The veteran lawmaker, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee who for years served in the U.S. Air Force Reserves while in Congress, and who once told voters not to support him if they were sick of war, argues that there are times when people’s aversion to conflict creates the conditions that beget war. He seems preoccupied these days with how the history of the present will be written in the future.
North Korea’s outlier behavior in the world, and its history of selling missiles and nuclear-related materials to countries such as Syria and Iran, inform Graham’s belief that more likely than North Korea firing its nuclear weapons at the United States is the North putting them on the black market. The biggest risk to the U.S. homeland and mankind as a whole is weapons of mass destruction making their way to people who wouldn’t hesitate to use them, he argues. And today those people belong to terrorist groups like ISIS or al-Qaeda. “What would be the source of those weapons?” Graham asked. “An unstable regime, cash-starved, controlled by a crazy man, called North Korea. ... I don’t see China selling [terrorist organizations] nuclear weapons. I don’t see Russia selling them nuclear weapons. I think for [terrorists] to build one of their own would be really tough and we’d probably know about it. I think the transfer of technology from North Korea to these groups would be very difficult to monitor.”
He acknowledged that preventive U.S. military action against North Korea could spiral into a conflict involving the use of nuclear weapons—and that any kind of conflict would probably engulf American civilians and U.S. troops in South Korea and Japan. “Fighting the North Korea threat over there protects the homeland,” he said. “That’s what [U.S. soldiers are] paid to do. That’s what they want to do. They sign up for these kind of risks.”
The urgency with which administration officials are imploring China to squeeze its neighbor, and their apparent lowering of the bar for negotiations, reflect a desire “to avoid what would be a catastrophic war for the region and the world.” But paradoxically that urgency also demonstrates that the probability of war is growing, he argued.
I for one do not sleep better at night with our own version of Kim Jong Un in the White House. The fact that the lives of my grandchildren are daily threatened by Trump's unfitness for office make me seethe. Be very, very afraid.It’s certainly possible that this is all calculated bluster—an attempt by Graham to advocate for his preferred policy agenda within the White House, intimidate North Korea, and spook China into doing what it has resisted for decades: Cut its lifeline to the Kim regime. When I asked Graham who he was directing his warnings about time running out to, he responded, “North Korea and Donald Trump.” He said he was “100 percent convinced that China is a rational actor, that they see North Korea as a thorn in our side—a problem for them, but the upside of North Korea is greater than the downside for them. That changes, the day that they believe Donald Trump will blow up the whole place.” . . . . understanding where the crisis over North Korea’s nuclear weapons is headed also requires reckoning with another possibility: that Graham and like-minded U.S. officials are deadly serious.
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