Trump as JFK? How haters and the media are underestimating the US president on North Korea
Niall Ferguson says after three predecessors chose inaction, Donald Trump’s willingness to use the threat of force as North Korea escalates its nuclear programme recalls John F. Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis
“The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta, made war inevitable.” This is the most famous line of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. Will a future historian one day write that the growth in the power of China, and the alarm this inspired in America, made war equally inevitable? Harvard’s Graham Allison fears the answer could be “yes”.
But the biggest flashpoint is without question North Korea, which brings me back to Thucydides and Graham Allison’s Destined for War , this summer’s must-read in both Washington and Beijing.
Thucydides was an Athenian general during the war between the Peloponnesian League (led by Sparta) and the Delian League (led by Athens), which lasted from 431 to 404 BC. The reason his history of the war is still read today is that it pioneered the kind of explanation of past events historians still use. Gods didn’t cause the war. Men did.
If you read Thucydides, you see the crucial role played by smaller powers in leading the two big powers down the road to war. The initial clash was in fact between Athens and Corinth; war came when the Corinthians appealed to the Spartans for aid.
That is a strategic game-changer. It is bad enough that the totalitarian regime in Pyongyang has acquired the capacity to nuke South Korea or Japan, both American allies. If it is just a few years away from being able to threaten San Francisco with obliteration, America surely must act.
Watch: America and China: Thucydides’ Trap
Trump feels the same way. On June 30 he tweeted: “The era of strategic patience with the North Korea regime has failed. That patience is over.” But what to do? He has four options, three of which have already failed.
Option two is what president Barack Obama tried: sanctions, backed up with UN Security Council resolutions. Obama didn’t just fail to halt the North’s nuclear programme; he speeded it up.
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Yet, that did not mean, as many inferred, that Mattis would resign rather than fight such a war. On the contrary: the national security adviser, H. R. McMaster – like Mattis, a highly experienced general – has made clear that the military option is on the table.
‘China’s starting to do something on North Korea’: McMaster
Does that mean the Trump administration is willing to see Seoul incinerated to stop Kim menacing Alaska? Again, no. With a naval build-up, America has the capacity to destroy such a large portion of North Korea’s arsenal so swiftly that damage to Seoul would be limited.
Is military action risky? That’s a stupid question. Military action is always risky, and Mattis is right to warn that a new Korean war would be highly destructive. The right question is whether or not the risk of inaction would be greater. Three presidents in succession decided that it would not be – and here we are. Is Donald Trump capable of breaking the sequence? I’d say so.
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Yet, in four of Allison’s 16 historical case studies, the rising power and the incumbent power did not end up going to war – the most relevant being the cold war between America and the Soviet Union.
If Allison is right to compare today’s missile crisis to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, then surely Trump has no option but to threaten to use force and bank on the other side’s blinking, with a little help from back-channel diplomacy.
Donald J. Trump as John F. Kennedy? Such a parallel is beyond the ken of the legions of Trump-haters. But the same people completely missed the Kennedy-style tone of Trump’s fine speech in defence of Western civilisation in Warsaw last Thursday.
The lesson of history is that not every great power falls into the Thucydides trap – but most journalists keep falling into the trap of underestimating Donald Trump.
Niall Ferguson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford