President Donald Trump said back in January it would never happen, but it did. North Korea successfully launched an intercontinental ballistic missile, meaning it could maybe someday hit the West Coast with a nuclear weapon. Here is a major concern demanding answers, and here is one thing that will not work.
That would be for Trump to send North Korean leader Kim Jong-un a video in which the president grabs him, throws him to the ground and starts punching him in the face.
Trump’s juvenile foray against CNN’s juveniles may seem irrelevant, a trivialization of a dead-serious issue. But that’s what Trump has been up to too much lately: Trivializing, trading confidence in his presidency for pettiness.
Can he rise above that? He better, and he has in fact made good moves. One of the best early on in his presidency was to establish what seemed a good relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping. China is North Korea’s biggest trading partner, has already hurt that nation with a coal boycott and could crush it practically overnight with enough similar measures. Through them, there could be peaceful nuclear disarmament, and the world could be a safer place.
But while it has been saying mostly the right things, China has done little, probably because it fears an eventual union of South and North Korea with the US military sitting near its border. Trump has expressed disappointment even as his administration has taken some steps encouraging China to act. It is, for instance, selling $1 billion worth of weapons to Taiwan, a nation of islands China figures on swallowing one of these days.
Other Korean options are not pretty, as experts inform us. We could have an all-out bombardment during which the North Koreans would likely kill millions in South Korea, not so cheap a price. Taking out Kim and his regime sounds like a good idea, but how? South Korea’s president says a smaller US military presence there could maybe make the North relax and step back some, but probably not. An Atlantic magazine writer says the best of all the bad options would be simply to live with the risk, doing all we can to improve our missile defense. I don’t think so.
I think the best course is to bring China around, and for two reasons. One is that even if a shattered economy does not change North Korea’s attitudes, it could very well destroy the country’s ability to act on them. The second is that China is emerging as a superpower, and if we do not learn to work with the Chinese in a realistic, practical fashion, the consequences could be calamitous. The New York Times recently reviewed two books saying a US-China war could be a real possibility at some point, and such a war could be world-crushing.
While there might be some advantage for China in letting North Korea further develop its nuclear capacities, the possibilities of disruptive hurt are hardly negligible. The United States would do well to be stern on some issues while seeking out means of mutually beneficial cooperation. It would make sense to try to return to something like the Obama administration’s Asian trade pact to further invigorate our economy and help better balance power in Asia.
As much as some hate to admit it, Trump has his virtues, but tweets are not one of them. The more he looks like a tasteless, vindictive, small-minded, self-obsessed president, the less effective he will be. The world, not so unexpectedly, is a mess, and we need him to use his virtues to make it less of one.
I am sure no video of Kim was ever planned, but any such video breeds trepidation that whacks effective action as much as fists whack the guy on the floor. What we need soon is another sit-down session with Xi, Mr. President.
By Jay Ambrose
Jay Ambrose is an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service. -- Ed.
(Tribune Content Agency)