The showdown with the
Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a seminal event that can only end in
one of two ways: a nuclear exchange or a reconfiguration of the international
order.
While complacency is
always unwarranted, the first seems increasingly unlikely. As no less a
global strategist than Steven Bannon observed about
the possibility of a pre-emptive U.S. strike: “There’s no military
solution. Forget it. Until somebody solves the part of the equation that
shows me that ten 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.”
This doesn’t mean that
Donald Trump, Bannon’s ex-boss, couldn’t still do something rash. After
all, this is a man who prides himself on being unpredictable in business negotiations,
as historian William R. Polk, who worked for the Kennedy administration during
the Cuban Missile Crisis, points out.
So maybe Trump thinks it would be a swell idea to go a bit nuts on the DPRK.