I recall TDS-unhinged people nearly panicked out of fear there could be a US-North Korea nuclear war. That seemed completely nuts. I had zero worries about that. Let's recall those stirring months of fear bouncing around in the heads of some people.
Just because those officials were worried about nuclear use doesn't mean their worries were valid:
Less than a year into Donald Trump’s presidency, top homeland security officials were so alarmed about escalating tensions with North Korea that they held multiple meetings to prepare for a nuclear attack on American soil, according to a forthcoming book by Miles Taylor, who was a top official in the department at the time.
I don't think North Korea was likely to attack because it would mean their total destruction in a counter-strike. I strongly doubt North Korea had functional nuclear weapons capable of reaching American soil.
Note too that at
the end we are told the possibility of Trump starting a war was remote:
“This is the first time to my knowledge that DHS thought there was the possibility, however remote, of Trump actually starting a war and us having to prepare for the nuclear fallout in the homeland,” he told POLITICO in an interview.And I imagine such meetings about a nuclear threat from somewhere took place under every president since Truman--despite so-called tight "scripts" for what should be said about nukes. Crises over North Korean nuclear threats have been common for thirty years. Remember, DHS is new since 9/11. So their first such meeting is a low bar.
And the threat was not direct nuclear attack but fallout reaching American territory. Which explains why this was a meeting in DHS and not DOD.
This whole story is meant to imply North Korea and America came close to exchanging nuke strikes. And that just isn't true if you make it past the headline and read the story to the end.
Which is the whole point.
Further, we've had many crises over nukes despite past presidents following the script. I recall being worried they could escalate to war in both 1994 and in 2009. I had some worries about a war early in the Trump administration--because of North Korea and not Trump. But no worries about a nuclear strike on America.
This is just a book promo by a proud anti-Trumper bureaucrat passed along by media happy
to indulge in a political attack. Admit it, they fear Trump more than
they fear actual nuclear-armed enemies. Indeed, these types usually claim those enemies are justified in wanting nukes to deter us.
FFS, these people don't worry that Russian blatant and frequent actual nuclear threats will provoke us into using nukes out of fear. They don't worry North Korea will carry out their nuclear sabre-rattling threats. No, the same type of people who panicked that Trump's words would push North Korea to use nukes also worry Russian nuclear threats mean Russia will strike and urge us to retreat to avoid that. They urge us to talk nicely--finely scripted, no doubt--to North Korea.
But finely scripted American words will just convince such paranoid nutballs that we are hiding our evil intentions! The bureaucratic faith in the right words has a long history, eh?
Nuclear weapons supposedly deter enemies. But for too many Americans, only America is deterred by the threat of nukes and compelled to talk softly and make concessions. In their world, enemies who make nuclear threats need to be given concessions to ease their concerns and quiet them.
The author seems to be throwing a fit that Trump wasn't worried
about what was frightening him and thwarting the book author's stalwart efforts to
save the republic from a threat that in his mind was the biggest threat to America.
Finally, foreigners don't parse the fine gradations of meaning as the authors of those scripts think, IMO.
Okay, this started out as a short passage in a weekend data dump. But the self-serving "but our democracy!" nonsense just pushed me to a (dignified) rant. Lord knows I have mixed feelings about Trump. But his enemies are so uniformly determined to turn any issue dial to eleven that it offends my sense of rationality.
The stupid just never stops.
NOTE: TDR Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
