A scant ten months ago at the third presidential debate, didn't Donald Trump groan into the camera "Our Nuclear....It's the Worst!!" What happened to our strategic forces since then to give the president the confidence to promise North Korea "Fire and Fury"?
:)
All snark aside the modalities behind this crisis are relatively simple, Kim wants keep his Plantation Overseer Hold on North Korea, he saw what happened to East Germany when the Socialist Bloc lost interest in the Cold War and wishes to avoid the same fate...chiefly because Komrade Kim is such sketchy little freak he's have few flight & asylum options. To do that he needs nukes, "nukes keep out troops" is his mantra. Its not lost on him that Israel's minimal nuclear arsenal has an outsized affect deterring Arab Agression against the Jewish State in Middle East.
The USA on the other hand, is desperately trying to shore up a nuclear non proliferation regime in the region sans much help from Moscow or Peking, NK's acquisition of nukes compromises our whole "active forward defense" posture in Asia & creates fear among our own alliance structure...it may even contribute to a pro Peking swing among said allies...who can say? Then again our president is an amateur who may think playing nuclear chicken with a vastly underestimated "pipsqueak Asian Despot" pushes Robert Mueller off the front pages which may well be Trump's sole goal here.
Well as Adlai Stevenson once observed "We are about to discover if this magnificent civilization of ours can create the statesmen necessary to prevent it from being blown sky-high".
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