Trump often misspeaks, self-aggrandizes, lies – the same as any politician – and he hyperbolizes, and is frequently wrong or selective and simplifying to the point of absurdity and untruth. There are a lot of things wrong with him, for sure.
But he did not misspeak in this instance.
He purely wanted to belittle and provoke the tinpot dictator. (You may call Trump a tinpot president, too, if you wish, but he is the President of the United States, not the dictatorial and murderous leader of a nation that starves its people routinely and, when it imprisons one of its citizens for political crimes also imprisons two additional generations of the family “for reasons.”)
Kim’s only trump card in his game is the threat he holds over South Korea, and specifically over the city of Seoul and its metro area of nearly 25,000,000 people. Every president who has dealt with him since Eisenhower has realized – more and more each year, and especially since around Carter’s and Reagan’s terms – that as Seoul grows it becomes a bigger and bigger hostage to the North.
There’s a lot of bluff in what Trump says. “Ruining” North Korea, even if we decided to actually make the strikes necessary to cause that, would cost many billions of dollars and, even if we did a lot of it remotely, thousands of US service people’s lives. But that’s nothing at all compared to what it would cost South Korea. And there’s a very real risk that in any “ambiguous” contest of “who shot first?” China would come down hard (albeit reluctantly) against any perceived aggression against North Korea.
China cannot appear – at least in its own view of itself and how it presents to the rest of Asia and the world – to permit a war to be fought on its border (which will cause massive and uncontrollable refugee emigration into China, too) – that it does not control. And in an ambiguous attack scenario, they will defend North Korea, even if they want to ruin or occupy it themselves.
So if there’s going to be any kind of US military intervention in North Korea, two things have to happen:
1. North Korea has to be unambiguously at fault and demonstrated as having “thrown the first punch”; that is, to make a first strike, and
2. China has to be enlisted against North Korea. No one wants to risk a war with China. It would also be helpful to have Russian assistance / cooperation, but that’s less vital at this point.
If Kim Jung Un can be provoked into making a first strike when he is unprepared for all-out war, or in a fit of pique when he makes an ineffective first strike, or if he is provoked into a “stupid” strike, such as dropping a missile on Japan in one of his test launches, for example, then that could be the “lowest-casualty path” to enlisting immediate and complete Chinese and Russian support to dismantle the threat to all nations, and not have to commit the USA to doing this thing alone.
Even better would be a coup in North Korea, even if it puts a cabal of generals in place to run the country. For those who seem to think that a coup in the USA to replace Donald Trump is a good thing, well, so much the better if that happens in North Korea.
Trump seems to be pretty good at provoking his opponents into stupid and ineffective responses. I’m sure part of his speech toward North Korea (and Iran) is aimed in this direction.
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