Slate - The Trump Administration Is Acting Hysterical Over North Korea [View all]

[TomCADem]

If the era of strategic patience is at an end, does that mean that unstrategic impatience is now the norm?

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2017/04/there_doesn_t_need_to_be_a_north_korean_crisis_right_now_why_is_trump_creating.html

North Korea is a knotty problem, but there’s no cause for the hysteria that President Trump and his aides have been pumping up in recent days, and it’s time to turn down the heat and the noise, before someone gets hurt.

The worry (and it’s a legitimate worry) is that, sometime soon, the North Koreans will test another ballistic missile or nuclear weapon, which would, yet again, violate a U.N. resolution and put them one step closer to threatening American troops and allies in East Asia—and maybe, years from now, the United States itself. But there is no immediate crisis, no threat that must be staved off now or never. And yet President Trump is sending an aircraft-carrier task force and a guided-missile submarine toward North Korean shores. At the same time, he has summoned all 100 U.S. senators to a classified briefing on the subject, to be conducted on Wednesday, at the White House, by the secretaries of defense and state, the director of national intelligence, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

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At least Kelly acknowledged that the specter of a North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile lies some years in the future. Some of his colleagues seem to be in more of a hurry. Vice President Mike Pence, during his visit last week to South Korea, said “the era of ‘strategic patience’ is over.” He was referring to President Obama’s phrase for a policy that recognized the limits of U.S. military power against North Korea and that focused instead on sanctions and containment as tools for eroding the Kim regime over time. Strategic patience may have borne scant fruit so far, but what is Pence’s alternative—unstrategic impatience?
Trump is not going to order a strike on North Korean soil, not even in retaliation to another missile or nuclear test, as long as South Korea or Japan has anything to say about it. If he does order a strike in defiance of their protests, then say goodbye to South Korea and Japan, among others, as allies—and that’s the best outcome. (The worst is the end of alliance plus a massive death toll.)

On the other hand, if the North Koreans do test another missile or nuke, and if Trump in his wisdom does not respond with military force, then his bellicose warnings of the past week—the threatening tweets, the siren-laced briefing, the gunboat demarche—would seem, in retrospect, like the growls of a paper tiger.?