Gideon Rachman: Why US is now dangerous
The FT’s chief foreign affairs commentator Gideon Rachman says President Donald Trump’s reaction to Pyongyang’s nuclear threat is dangerous. In using rhetoric that North Korea risks ‘fire and fury’ from a ‘locked and loaded’ the US has deliberately escalated tensions.
Filmed by Nicola Stansfield. Produced by Daniel Garrahan
Transcript
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America undoubtedly faces a very dangerous situation in North Korea. But the reaction of the Trump administration has been pretty dangerous in itself. By using language like "fire and fury," "locked and loaded," President Trump has quite deliberately escalated the tensions. That's a form of foreign policy that's known as brinksmanship.
But the risk, obviously is that North Korea reacts very unpredictably, maybe escalates the situation itself. Or, indeed the Trump White House is actually considering a preemptive strike on North Korea to deal with its nuclear programme, which would risk an all-out conflict on the Korean peninsula, and in my view is unnecessary because America has in the past successfully used deterrence to deal with other dangerous nuclear states such as Russia under Stalin or Mao under China.
The North Korean crisis is all the more unsettling because it's taking place at the same time as an acute domestic political crisis in the United States where the investigation by the former FBI director Robert Mueller now getting much closer to the Trump White House as it probes the links between the Russian government and the Trump election campaign. The danger for that is twofold-- first, that Mr. Trump may be tempted, as other leaders have been in history, to use a foreign crisis as a distraction from his domestic problems and maybe as a way of rallying support domestically. And the second is that it only increases the strain on an already volatile, emotional, and irascible president whose behaviour may become more unpredictable as the pressures on him domestically mount.
Most of Mr Trump's foes have been hoping that he is surrounded by people who are rather calmer and more deliberate in their approach to foreign policy-- people like General HR McMaster, the national security adviser, or Rex Tillerson at the State Department, and now General Kelly, who's the White House Chief of Staff. However it's been noticeable that there's been very little overt pushback by these so-called adults against the very bellicose language that Mr. Trump has used against North Korea. Indeed, they've come out on television and supported it.
And in the long run, the unescapable fact is that President Donald Trump is the commander-in-chief. He has tremendous power, particularly, unfortunately over the use of nuclear weapons, where the president cannot be countermanded if he decides to order a nuclear strike.
Many people unsettled by the presidency of Donald Trump are treating it like a kind of bad dream, hoping that perhaps he will be forced from office or that he will just serve one term, and then America will then go back to a more normal state in politics. However, there is a disturbing issue, which is what led to the election of such an unusual and alarming president. And that points to perhaps a degree of economic and social turmoil in the United States-- rising racial tensions, which we've seen now on the streets of Charlottesville; political polarisation-- that suggest that perhaps even if Donald Trump goes, those underlying tensions will continue to make America much less stable than it's been in the more recent past.
