In the recent rhetoric over tensions in the Korean Peninsula, US President Trump called North Korean Chairman Kim “Rocket Man” and Chairman Kim responded by calling Trump a “Dotard”. The exchange has plumbed the depths of statesmanship, with the greater offender being President Dotard. Language threatening Fire and Fury, national annihilation and extreme personal insults have been exchanged between two nuclear armed states…it makes you positively pine for the old days of a Cuban Missile Crisis presided over by President Kennedy and Chairman Khrushchev.
Promises of genocide are thrown around casually by the “Leader of the Free World” as an appropriate response to North Korea’s provocative testing of its missile and nuclear weapons. The sage advice of Russia and China for both sides to stand down has been dismissed by President Dotard as weak-kneed coddling of Chairman Rocket Man; ignoring Putin’s warning that the continued military hysteria is an “invitation to the graveyard”.
President Moon of South Korea whose country would be devastated under virtually any scenario of war between the US and North Korea has joined President Dotard in threatening to wipe out Pyongyang and has let it be known that his country has a Decapitation Force that is being trained by US special forces to assassinate Chairman Rocket Man.
Not to be outdone, Prime Minister Abe, seemingly longing to return to his country’s violent heyday in the early part of the 20th century when Japanese boots trampled over much of Asia, is sounding like a boastful Samurai when in all likelihood a few well-directed nuclear weapons from the DPRK could see millions of Japanese deaths and Japan’s economy in tatters.
As “diplomats” from some countries reflexively applauded President Dotard’s threat to wage nuclear war, there were a few adults in the halls of power around the world who were left wondering if anything could be done to prevent this doltish behavior from resulting in a global calamity. Some might suggest that its time to pray that a head-on collision between President Dotard and Chairman Rocket Man is somehow derailed before millions die and history remembers our era for the casualness with which we sleepwalked into perhaps the greatest slaughter of humanity ever.
More practically, thought should be given to how the authority to wage nuclear war has found itself in such unworthy hands and what can be done to prevent the fate of millions from hanging by such a weak thread of reason.