A Campaign Without a Campaign

North Korea:

This week at the Olympics, Vice President Mike Pence spent his time doing what he does best, avoiding those who offend his fragile and expensive sensibilities. In an amazing reversal a few days later, Pence decided to channel Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, offering to talk with North Korea without preconditions. While this latter development is a positive step, one wouldn't be surprised if the President undercuts his underlings international diplomacy with Twitter.

While the world receives an Olympic reprieve as the Korean peninsula seeks reconciliation, or at least peace over who can throw themselves fastest down a icy slope on a piece of wood, it seems reasonable to consider how close to war North Korea and the United States are.

There have been the tweets and off the cuff remarks by the President. Lindsey Graham and McMaster have offered percentages which should elicit terror rather than elation.

On February 3rd, talking about North Korea, the President said, “We have no road left,” praised himself for his effort, and blamed prior administrations for the current situation. Four days earlier the CIA director, Mike Pompeo, said North Korea appears to be “a handful of months” short of deploying a nuclear weapon capable of striking the United States.

With this achievement, will North Korea have crossed the President's Red Line? When President Obama delineated his red line in Syria, he blundered terribly, and the appropriate actors called him out. The current President though, made the worst mistake possible: repeating an error he excoriated. So might Trump, recognizing his conundrum, enforce his edict with fire and fury? Are you ok that with that, because it doesn't appear the Pentagon or the public is.

The New York Times reported on February 1st, the Pentagon appears worried the White House might intend to start a war with North Korea, and that providing too many options could increase the likelihood that the President acts. Personally, I disagree: if you offer him too many options, maybe he'll be seized by analysis paralysis. McMaster criticized the Pentagon for undercutting the President's threats, by slow-walking plans to the White House. McMaster's logic: If there is no military option available, than diplomacy can not succeed, which can also phrased: no stick, no success.

While the White House expresses a mixture of enthusiasm and ambivalence to the conflict, others agree that the public has been improperly informed, with Vox comparing the nation to a sleepwalker. They quote Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth, and Iraq war veteran, who recently visited South Korea as saying, “We are far closer to actual conflict over North Korea than the American people realize”. Which raises the question: do United States citizens believe war is imminent?

Polling seems to indicate a few conclusions. A clear majority of United States citizens believe; North Korea is a serious threat, the United States should negotiate, the President can't be trusted, the United States should attack only if attacked first, and the United States will not be at war with North Korea in the near future. These results prove Senator Duckworth's sentiment, that the public is not expecting war. If war is as imminent as Senators Duckworth and Graham believe, who's at fault for the public's misconception.

I was in 9th grade when the United States invaded a bear trap of its own making, in order to eliminate Al-Qaeda and prevent Osama bin Laden from initiating further terrorist attacks against the West. I was two years older when the United States invaded Iraq under the guise of curtailing the nation's brutal weapons and the barbarity it inflicted on its own citizens. The Bush administration inflamed these anxieties into a conflagration, fueled by lies. The immense outpouring of propaganda, and the failure of the press to resist it, is still astonishing, made more so by the lack of criminal prosecution.

In comparison, North Korea's atrocities against its own citizens far exceed Iraq's, it has the nuclear and biological weapons which Saddam had destroyed and discontinued, and Kim Jong Un has threatened the United States more than Iraq ever did. On these three criteria, an invasion of North Korea is more justified than the 2003 storming of Iraq, yet the occupation was a grave injustice and a costly mistake. Any assault of North Korea would be an unconscionable error.

In short, an attack on North Korea is likely to render the global power structure unrecognizable, by altering the United States irreparably. With mounting debt, acquired mostly due to the two unendable wars begun by the Bush administration, and the Great Recession (whose fault should be laid at every President beginning with Reagan), a third, more costly war, will place an immeasurable strain on the United States' Treasury and the global power of the dollar (this debt is compounded by the Republican giveaway to corporations). While economists debate whether the debt of the United States is a problem (and Republicans only express concern when a Democrat resides in the White House), a common citizen can question the value of charging a expansive, expensive war (assume value equal to Iraq, 2.4 trillion) to the mounting unpayable bill.

In a further difference with Iraq, North Korea maintains a superpower patron, China, who defended them in the original Korean War. While no one's certain what China intends, experts agree that Xi Jinping, doesn't want a unified Korea aligned with the United States, nor countless, desperate refugees fleeing the conflict, destabilizing China.

But if the White House is willing to overlook all these issues and set themselves to war, why isn't the White House making the same propagandic push as the Bush administration? Perhaps they hope to avoid it, stumbling haphazardly forward and back, or maybe they intend to build this ominous atmosphere with vague threatening statements as its own case for conflict. Or most worrisome, as the Vox article quotes Joshua Pollack, as saying, what keeps him up at night is, “If you believe that war is imminent, you’re going to want to get your shot in first.”

Is the Trump Administration's lack of propaganda an attempt to get the first shot? Or is it: indecision, bluffing, incompetence? And which is worse?

Next week, an examination of the President's State of the Union speech in relation to the Korean conundrum. 

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