THEY’RE READY TO FIGHT — BUT FOR WHAT GAIN?

By Edwin Cooney

Okay, President Trump almost has his foreign policy hawks in alignment. His proposed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will soon face the United States Senate for confirmation and John Bolton takes his office on this very day as National Security Advisor. (That office needs no Senate confirmation.) Thus, the above question.

Both Pompeo and Bolton have chided previous presidents about being too weak when it comes to dealing with our most outspoken enemies including North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and, of course, Isis. Now Messrs. Pompeo, Bolton and Trump stand shoulder to shoulder in defense of not only our democratic principles but our very lives. Since the first challenge is likely to be North Korea and since Kim Jong-un possesses nuclear weapons (as do his Chinese allies), what can Pompeo, Bolton and Trump do that both fulfills their ambitions and yet preserves humanity on a livable earth?

The answer to that for me is not very much. Both men appear to be determined to end North Korea’s existence as a nuclear threat even though North Korea appears to have something like 50 or 60 intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads. It’s even been suggested that President Trump may well employ a preventative strike to settle the matter. I can’t see how that could be anything less than a nuclear strike with all of the international political and worldwide environmental ramifications.

Back on March 12th in a column I titled “President Donald Trump Thinks He Can,” I suggested that the only realistic outcome of the upcoming Trump/Kim meeting would be that we agree to urge South Korea to recognize Kim’s government as legitimate. One of my readers, a very good friend of mine, chided me for that view insisting that I obviously fail to take Marxism very seriously. Being the scholar that he is, he sent me a speech by a very learned Canadian professor Jordan Peterson in which the good professor reminded us all of how evil Marxism was — more evil even than Nazism. It was a rather interesting lecture and I found myself interested in what Professor Peterson had to say. However, both my friend’s observation and Professor Peterson’s totally miss the point. I fear that President Trump’s Secretary of State Pompeo (that is, if he is confirmed!) and National Security Advisor Bolton’s outlook are just as beyond the point as that of my friend and Dr. Peterson.

Suppose President Trump does launch a strike on North Korea. Let us assume that North Korea turns out to be too weak to respond in kind, thereby enabling the President and Pompeo and Bolton to declare a military victory. Do they really think the rest of the world will cheer and that they will be heroes? Do they believe that there would be no appreciable environmental damage? Would our South Korean allies be unscathed by atomic fallout or by residual military destruction? Is it likely that the world wouldn’t insist that the American taxpayer, at the very least, clean up the atomic mess? What would that cost the increasingly hungry American taxpayer? How anxious would other governments and peoples be to trade with us? Might we face a severe dose of enforced economic, political and moral isolationism by becoming both the first and second nation in history to use nuclear weapons? Would that taxpayer be enthusiastic about paying to rebuild North Korea even though the territory would likely be a nuclear wasteland? I made reference to that in my March 12th column when I quoted President Kennedy’s observation during the October 1962 Cuban Missile crisis that “…even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth.” All of the above is only a best-case scenario.

It doesn’t take into consideration how either the Chinese or the Russians would likely feel obligated to respond to this anti-Marxian gesture on the part of “capitalist imperialistic America.” Nor does it take into adequate account how the rest of the world might well feel about us or about our leadership. Might the American president become an international criminal, a status not even the notoriously evil Joseph Stalin achieved? (Of course, Stalin ultimately richly deserved that designation.) Keep in mind that Ambassador Bolton and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld were just sure we would be welcomed by flower-throwing Iraqi crowds once we had freed the people of Saddam Hussein.

I regard all of the following “isms” to be essentially evil: Marxism or Communism, Nazism or Fascism, Isis-ism, even gangsterism. Radical “anything” is at the very least an obsession which is thereby unrealistic or unhealthy. As I see it, even unregulated democracy or capitalism is unhealthy. It might be observed that Soviet leaders, since they lacked the Christian assuredness of life after death, were ultimately unwilling to pull the nuclear trigger. On the other hand, radical Christianity or Islam may be lethal since the religious often believe they are headed for paradise.

Keep in mind all of the above assumes a minimal cost. Perhaps North Korea will respond by dropping nuclear weapons on our west coast. Perhaps if they don’t or can’t,  China may assume that it is in its national interest to do so. We then would be forced to widen the conflict.

All of this is possible but it doesn’t have to be a reality. Armageddon, the ultimate biblical struggle, lacks the two essential opponents at this time: “the all good” against “the all evil.”

As I see it, up to this date the reality is that we have yet to recognize and legitimatize all of the good in the world. Until we’ve accomplished that, we’re hardly in a position to assuredly identify all that’s truly evil in the world.

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY