by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
Something’s up. My spidy senses are tingling. I have grown very jaded and cynical about anything having to do with North Korea, but the curious statements coming out of the Trump Administration the last few days about the DPRK make me scratch my head a little bit.
I see the North Korea situation as a major gimme for Trump. It’s his huge backup fail safe should the TrumpRussia problem finally go China Syndrome and look like it’s going to end his administration. It may very well be that nothing happens. It could be that Trump will leave office in four to eight years and the DPRK will still be there and this long-term problem we have with them will be kicked down the road for another long bit.
Or…the Trump Administration is singling that they’re going to strike the DPRK in some way and let the chips fall where they will. Now, remember, the DPRK is very unpredictable and they very much want to survive, so the States might do some limited bombing and, well, nothing might happen.
Or, all hell will break loose and 500,000 people in Seoul and beyond might die in the first month of the conflict. Such an enormous regional war would have a dynamic all its own and some pretty amazing things might happen. It doesn’t take too much to think maybe Trump might use the DPRK to wag the dog. He might attack the North Koreans, sit back for them to freak out and in the ensuing chaos use pardon the hell out of people left and right and maybe even fire Bob Mueller along the way. There simply would be so much going on in Washington D.C. and beyond that the press wouldn’t be able to keep up. Add to this the possibility that Trump doing this might be seen by Russia as a green light to attack Ukraine in a big way — not to mention whatever Iran might cook up — and you have the makings of something that would be marketed by the American press as WWIII.
Or not. I am so jaded that I have a feeling the whole kick-the-can-down-the-alley option is what is going to happen with the DPRK. It would be so callus, so transparent if Trump wagged the dog with the DPRK at this point that, well, I don’t quite know what to think of that prospect. That Trump would use the potential death of half a million people — at least — as political cover to save his own presidency kind of blows my mind. But it would make a lot of sense. By the time the States finally got around to winning the war in three to six months, TrumpRussia would be a forgotten scandal and Trump would be in a strong position to win the mid-terms and potentially a second term.
But so much could go wrong with a war with the DPRK that I just don’t know. I just don’t know if I’m reading too much into all of this or what. I can’t get a handle on it. I think everything is going to work itself out and nothing is going to happen. The alternative is to horrible and bloody to brood on for too long. I mean, the Chinese and the Russians could get involved, the DPRK could attempt to bomb Japan. Or they could attempt to nuke Seoul in some sort of blackmail situation. Wars are easily started and difficult to end as the old adage goes and Korean War 2.0 would be no different.
Only time will tell, I guess.
