P!
Tongil!
Austin Bay describes what might be called Trump’s “Sam Spade” strategy for handling North Korea. The fictional Spade as you may recall from the Maltese Falcon faced the problem of neutralizing an armed gunman. He did this by ignoring the thug while convincing his boss that gunplay would be in neither of their interests.
Bay notes that Donald Trump’s Twitzkrieg against Kim Jong Un takes a similar tack. Trump reminds China that a nuclear armed Pyongyang — not Beijing — would hold the key to war and peace in North Asia, an intolerable state of affairs for the control freaks in the Communist Politburo.
Trumps strategy is to push until something breaks betting that Chinese link with Pyongyang will give before Beijing’s link with the rest of the world snaps. Ratcheting up the rhetoric with Kim is a big risk. But arguably the real gamble has already been taken by letting Kim get nukes in the first place. The failure of past administrations to contain nuclear proliferation has already rolled the dice. We are only living in the world they allowed to happen.
The weakness of Trump’s strategy is it can’t roll back the failure of nonproliferation — it can’t uninvent the gun in the gunman’s hand — it can only try to shift control from Wilmer to Kaspar Gutman or analogously the nuclear trigger from Pyongyang to China. It may never work until a sufficiently scary incident occurs to jolt Beijing into collecting the WMDs.
But it’s the only play available. Austin Bay says “Trump’s information operation appalls mainstream media.” And well it should because it Trump is basically proposing that China sell out its own flunkey. “Let’s give ‘em the gunsel. Anyway, he’s made to order for the part, look at him.”
Well indeed, look at him.
https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2017/10/11/behind-kims-back/