The View | Can Trump’s brash business style pull us back from the brink of nuclear war?
National security decisions are unlike business decisions in one critical way: you can learn and recover from most mistakes in business
President Donald Trump tweeted: “North Korea is looking for trouble. If China decides to help, that would be great. If not, we will solve the problem without them!”
The threat of instability and the outbreak of war on the Korean peninsula is probably 2017’s wild card, which could foretell chaos for markets and global economies.
With each successive test launch, North Korea creeps closer to its goal of developing an intercontinental ballistic missile that could threaten the US mainland. Trump has stated that the US is open to taking military action to try prevent this.
He [Trump] has to be careful not to let events unfold with an urgency that becomes so fluid that they spin out of control
While the US certainly sent a message with a recent salvo of 59 cruise missiles directed at a Syrian air base, it confronts limited choices in striking North Korea, which has batteries of missile launchers and artillery that could effectively flatten Seoul, South Korea’s capital of 10 million people.
Trump and US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will have to contend with something that few successful businessmen encounter: the wilderness of mirrors that constitutes national security issues.
The Cold War taught us that’s where lies and truth are indistinguishable enough to form facts. The inherent ifs, errors and commitments by Trump after his latest tweet will be the ingredients of high drama – success or tragedy.
Vague outcomes and plodding diplomacy are anathema to profit and results-driven, rational behaviour seekers such as Trump and Tillerson.
