Don't count on China to save us from nuclear war

Team Trump probably thinks threatening war will motivate the Chinese to do … something. Trump isn’t the kind of guy who gives thoughtful answers to foreign-policy questions, but there is a single idée fixe to which he always returns on the subject of North Korea: that China could solve the North Korea problem if it warned to. To be fair, it isn’t just Trump who says this. The thought that China can solve the problem with North Korea is one of the more tiresome bits of Washington wisdom.

But China isn’t about to solve the problem for us. For one thing, the North Koreans have systematically executed pro-Chinese elements inside North Korea and out. When Kim ordered his uncle arrested and executed, his business dealings with China were cited as a major reason. And it was likely because he feared China might try to install his half-brother in power that Kim ordered the assassination of Kim Jong Nam, who was living in Macau under Chinese protection. If the Chinese could order Kim Jong Un around, his uncle and half-brother wouldn’t be sleeping with the fishes.

  Foreign Policy

I believe Xi has already acknowledged he can't control KJU.

None of which is to say Trump won’t end up talking himself into the punch-him-in-the-nose nonsense. After all, the Joint Chiefs of Staff spent the Cuban missile crisis pressing John F. Kennedy to attack the island, even though we now realize that the Soviet Union had a lot of nuclear weapons on the ground there. Human beings make mistakes.

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Frankly, I worry even about containment strategies. You can’t beat something with nothing, so my guess is that the U.S. Defense Department isn’t satisfied with bluffing a punch in the nose and really is developing containment strategies as an alternative. But even those can go wrong. When Ronald Reagan came into office, he ordered a series of psychological operations against the Soviets. These operations consisted of naval and air probes of Soviet defenses. “It really got to them,” one Reagan official later recalled. “They didn’t know what it all meant. A squadron would fly straight at Soviet airspace, and other radars would light up and units would go on alert. Then at the last minute the squadron would peel off and return home.”

The result was that the jumpy Soviets shot down a civilian airliner en route to Seoul, triggering the most dangerous Cold War crisis since Cuba.

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The most likely scenario is still that we’ll muddle through without a nuclear war in 2018, and I’ll crow that McMaster and others were bluffing all along. And it will only be years later that James Mattis or someone writes a memoir letting us know that every day was a battle to stop McMaster from starting a nuclear war or that Trump kept asking for the launch codes.