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By APD writer Lu Jiafei
Washington, Oct. 31 (APD) -- Days after U.S. President Donald Trump’s improvised rant of “fire and fury” to Pyongyang promoted the latter to threaten to strike the American territory of Guam in August, I met Gyuseok Jang, a South Korean reporter who had just arrived in Washington.
Though it was not my style, I got rid of the common courtesy of making small talk and went directly to the question that had bothered me since Trump’s combative rhetoric: Is a conflict on the Korean Peninsula imminent?
For decades, as the memory of the 13-day-long Cuban missile crisis between the United States and Soviet Union in 1962 sank into oblivion, we tended to view nuclear Armageddon as a fictional catastrophe.
U.S. President Donald Trump
With Trump’s seemingly frivolous attitude toward military action against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and his blatant disdain for diplomacy, the once unthinkable has now become discussable.
Though apparently surprised by my straightforwardness, Jang reassured me that any conflict on the Korean Peninsula was unlikely despite the heated rhetoric between Trump and the DPRK leader, because no real war preparation actions had been taken on both sides, including the evacuation of U.S. civilians in South Korea and military buildup around the region.
“Besides, even a guy as crazy and unhinged as Donald Trump knows what the cost would be,” Jang told me then.
Less than a month after my encounter with the South Korean, the bellicose U.S. president defied any diplomatic decorum in front of the whole world and threatened to “totally destroy” the DPRK at his UN speech.
That speech could be one of the darkest moments for humanity.
For the Trump administration, the similarities between the current U.S.-DPRK nuclear showdown and the Cuban missile crisis are telltale, with Sebastian Gorka, former deputy assistant to Trump, once claiming that “This is analogous to the Cuban missile crisis.”
Unfortunately, Trump is no John F. Kennedy. To be more precisely, he is the opposite of Kennedy, who together with his Soviet counterpart Nikita Khrushchev deftly steered the two Cold War rivals away from a full-scale nuclear wars
What strikes me most is the sharp contrast between Kennedy and Trump in terms of self-restraint when it comes to nuclear crisis.
Cuban Missile Crisis
One key feature of Kennedy’s successful approach to navigate the treacherous tides of the Cuban Missile Crisis was the president’s discretion and low-key attitude. Apart from receiving the briefing, Kennedy devoted most of his public appearance to things unrelated to the nuclear crisis.
That presidential discretion was crucial for a crisis as significant as a nuclear showdown since it offered officials the space urgently needed to defuse the tension behind the scenes.
By contrast, Trump acts like hosting a reality TV show called Guess When Would I blow Up the World. By publicly throwing tantrums and bluff on Twitter, Trump is doing nothing but leave his administration officials bound and gagged.
The two men’s attitudes toward diplomacy are equally poles apart. According to multiple historians, during the second-to-last day of the Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as “Black Saturday,” a U.S. reconnaissance plane was shot down over Cuba, and the pilot was killed in the incident.
The casualty immediately intensified the pressure on Kennedy to launch attack. Luckily, he stuck to diplomacy and negotiated a de-escalation with the Soviet leader before things span out of control.
Trump, by contrast, undercut his own secretary of state’s effort at back-channel diplomacy with the DPRK by claiming on Twitter that it was “wasting time trying to negotiate with” the DPRK, suggesting that only a war would resolve the conflict.
In a town full of political gossips and rumors, it’s now an irrefutable public knowledge that Trump does not read much. But the former reality TV show celebrity should at least read about the history of the Cuban Missile Crisis to get a touch of how easily the nuclear brinkmanship could evolve into a war whether by accident or miscalculation, even with respect for diplomacy from a sophisticated president like Kennedy.
Trump should also read about Kennedy’s speech on peace in 1963, when Kennedy said that “Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.”
Early this month, Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, charged that with reckless threats, Trump was setting the country “on the path to World War III.”
Unlike Trump’s madman bluff, Corker’s warning was dead serious.
Lu Jiafei, researcher of APD Institute. After spending one year in Palestine covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict between 2013 and 2014, Lu moved to Washignton, D.C. and covered the 2016 U.S. presidential election till the very end of Donald Trump’s upset victory. He is a political contributor to APD.
(ASIA PACIFIC DAILY)
