by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
All strategic, long-term indicators point to a preemptive war between the United States and the DPRK. I say this because everywhere I look, it seems, I see a new slight turn towards this inevitability. It just makes so much sense on a macro level.
We have, in the guise of Donald Trump, a mercurial, bonkers egomaniac leading the United States with historically low poll numbers going into a crucial mid-terms knowing that if he loses the House and or the Senate he could very well be impeached and convicted. It is simply to logical to think that Trump would see a quick, massively bloody war with the DPRK as his “fail safe.”
One thing we have to remember is, in the lead up to the Iraq War, there was all kinds of frantic diplomatic efforts to avoid war. But the fix was in. President Bush II wanted a war and he got one. So I wouldn’t get too excited if the DPRK frantically has high level talks with South Korea. The key thing to remember is the DPRK has an absolute need for security guarantees. The very thing they will never give up — the ICBM technology combined with their A-bomb technology — is the very things that Trump sees as his “red line.”
So, we’re hurdling towards a fish or cut bait moment.
Either the United States accepts the DPRK as a nuclear power and uses the age-old tactic of deterrence or it doesn’t. And by “doesn’t,” I mean we have a bloody, tragic preventable war in Northeast Asia with God-only-knows what kind of results.
Trump’s logic of war is that if he picks just the right moment to start such a war, that Lee Greenwood will be crooning “God Bless The USA” just about the time that voters are going to the polls in November. What I fear is that in hindsight, this could be a pretty enormous miscalculation. While the DPRK doesn’t want a war, if it feels as though the war is inevitable, things could spin entirely out of control. By that I mean, as the old adage goes, wars, like romance, are easily started by difficult to end.
The DPRK has had over 60 years to prepare for its final gotterdammerung. Besides the wide range of WMD options the DPRK has at its disposal, there are more unconventional options such as sleeper cells that would wreak enormous havoc domestically in the United States. Should a war with the DPRK start and DPRK sleeper cells be activated and thousands of Americans die across the country, that might make the Trump “fail safe” belief seem rather quaint.
As I understand it, there are about 100,000 American civilians in South Korea and countless more in Japan. And there simply is no easy way to bug out that many people without spooking the DPRK so much that they don’t start the war themselves. Thus, it seems as though we’re hurdling towards a situation where a war might start pretty abruptly and countless scores of American civilians will come back to the States in bodybags.
But I can see the appeal of a preemptive war with the DPRK for Donald Trump. He knows 500,000 or more people could die in the opening days of such a war and he simply doesn’t care. He lacks all sense of empathy and sees things in the cold, hard terms of white knuckled politics. He really, really wants Lee Greenwood crooning his hits on TV as people leave their house to vote in November, so once he knows for a fact that the DPRK has crossed his “red line” it is inevitable that a war will happen, it’s just a matter of how and when.
Therefore, I believe that at some point between now and November 2018, we’re going to war with the DPRK for no other reason than the North Koreans are never going to give up the security that being a nuclear power would provide.
Hold on to your hats, folks, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
