The Trump Doctrine

The Trump Doctrine
Making Nuclear Weapons Usable Again
By Michael T. Klare, Tomgram, Nov. 19, 2017

The year was 1950, the Korean War was underway, and the person in question was General Douglas MacArthur who, in terms of pure megalomania and self-regard, was surely the Donald Trump of his moment.  As it happened, the general was gunning not just for Koreans but for a Democrat by the name of Harry Truman, a president who would, in the end, act as a commander in chief should.  In a move deeply unpopular in its moment, he would dismiss his war commander (whom he dubbed “Mr. Prima Donna”) only to watch MacArthur come home to a 19-mile New York City ticker-tape parade (and 3,000 tons of dropped paper) seen by more than seven million cheering spectators.
The Korean War was subsequently fought to a draw without atomic weapons, belts of cobalt, or anything else that might, in the end, have led to a global nuclear conflagration, in part because a president was able to corral an over-the-top general.  Almost three quarters of a century later, the question, when it comes to that same peninsula and those same weapons, is: Who could corral a president with a yen to use them and the “sole authority” to do so?  We’re talking here about a man who, in the 2016 election campaign, wondered aloud to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews why in the world, when it came to nuclear weapons, we would be “making them” if we weren’t planning on using them? ...

North Korea and war

A Murderous History of Korea

Bruce Cumings

More than four decades ago I went to lunch with a diplomatic historian who, like me, was going through Korea-related documents at the National Archives in Washington. He happened to remark that he sometimes wondered whether the Korean Demilitarised Zone might be ground zero for the end of the world. This April, Kim In-ryong, a North Korean diplomat at the UN, warned of ‘a dangerous situation in which a thermonuclear war may break out at any moment’. A few days later, President Trump told Reuters that ‘we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea.’ American atmospheric scientists have shown that even a relatively contained nuclear war would throw up enough soot and debris to threaten the global population:

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