Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
I’m beginning to suspect that the rest of the world is going to be having an awful lot of fun at our president’s expense these next four years; the man has more triggers than a gender-fluid college fresh-person and they’re just about as predictable as well. Back on January 4, I reported on how North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un brilliantly trolled then-President-Elect Trump by promising to test an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) by the end of the year. By definition, an ICBM would have sufficient range to reach the United States. Trump’s reaction is probably still being laughed about in Pyongyang.
“North Korea just stated that it is in the final stages of developing a nuclear weapon capable of reaching parts of the US. It won’t happen,” Trump tweeted (what else?) in reply.
This, of course, set off a wave of hand-wringing and doom-saying speculation.
“Has our next commander-in-chief issued, 18 days before his inauguration, a pledge that the US will wage pre-emptive war against the DPRK?” asked Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution.
Well, apparently Iran wanted in on the fun too, so, on January 29, Iran tested a medium-range ballistic missile. In my mind’s eye I can picture Iranian government officials and military generals watching the rocket disappear into the sky, craning their necks way back to see it ascend into the heavens; then looking down at their phones to see if Trump had taken to Twitter over it yet. They wouldn’t have to wait long. By the following Friday, Trump and the Treasury Department put fresh sanctions on 25 people and organizations related to Iran’s ballistic missile program, or whom the U.S. government suspects might be kind of a jerk. Trump announced he was “putting Iran on notice,” and that Iran was “playing with fire,” according to a Washington Post article.
As Reuters and others reported, the test itself wasn’t a violation of the idiotic nuclear deal Obama accepted with Iran. And, Iran insists the test wasn’t intended to send a message to Trump. Regardless, Trump, predictably, had plenty of messages for Iran.
“This president is not going to sit by and let Iran flout its violations or apparent violations to the joint agreement … I think Iran is kidding itself if they don’t realize there’s a new president in town,” Said White House spokesman Sean Spicer.
Actually, yes, he is. Trump will sit idly by and let Iran flout the nuclear deal right up to and beyond the point a mushroom cloud appears outside Natanz, Iran. He will do so for the same reasons past administrations sat idly by as North Korea and Pakistan developed nuclear weapons; because he is powerless to stop other sovereign nations from developing a 70-year-old technology.
Furthermore, Trump will sit idly by as Iran’s ballistic missile program improves because, what began in Peenemünde and eventually shot Voyager I into interstellar space is also a very old technology.
This sort of phallus-waving however is just what heads-of-state do. Donald Trump and Ali Hosseini Khamenei, and Kim Jong Un for that matter, have countries to run, countries full of people routinely and comprehensively exploited by their government. The reason why the life of the governed in every country on earth isn’t as happy as it could be is because they live under a government. Governments, for their part, naturally have an existential desire to keep this fact from becoming common knowledge among the peasantry. So, governments need problems. Big problems. Intractable problems. Problems that cannot, actually, be solved. Thus we end up with the weird, codependent state of geopolitical affairs that exists between the United States and most of the rest of the world. Kim Jong Un, and to a lesser extent Ali Hosseini Khamenei, need the United States; we’re the bad guy, the villain, the problem to be solved, the “problem” that can be used to distract the serfs from the real source of their misery.
The same is true for the USA. Generations of Americans have been programmed by public education to accept the need for a state and to believe in the inherent correctness of theirs. This blind adoration isn’t quite enough to sufficiently distract us so that we can be plundered by the oligarchy however; the people need to be scared of something, some outside threat only the federal government can “protect” them from. Nothing fits that bill like nuclear-tipped ICBMs in the hands of “evil Muslim terrorists in Iran” or the son of a bat-shit-crazy despot in North Korea.
The best we can hope for is that someone will take Trump aside at some point and explain this game of codependent brinksmanship to him, lest someone gets hurt.
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