Will the Trump-Kim war of words go nuclear or lead to talks?

Andrew Sheng hopes common sense will prevail in an era of asymmetric warfare, which highlights the limits of a unipolar order. But meanwhile, market speculators may be responding in the correct way to long-term uncertainty

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Activists seeking the abolition of nuclear weapons wear masks of US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as they pose with a mock missile, during demonstrations in front of the North Korean embassy in Berlin on September 13. Photo: AFP

Published: 12:49pm, 29 Sep 2017Updated: 7:21pm, 29 Sep 2017

In the past fortnight, the world has been treated to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and US President Donald Trump calling each other names, from rocket man to dotard. Are we on the edge of a nuclear war? How can that be when the stock markets are still rising, gold prices have hardly moved and Trump is debating with the National Football League about whether players who only kneel for the national anthem should be fired?

The reason there is hardly any mass reaction to the fear of nuclear war is that most people cannot remember the horrors of Hiroshima (where the first atomic bomb was dropped), or the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when the US and Soviet Union were on the brink of nuclear war. Both antagonists in 1962, US president John F. Kennedy and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, remembered well the second world war and wisely turned away from using nuclear arms.

Then US president John F. Kennedy (far right) and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev at the residence of the US ambassador in Vienna in June 1961. Photo: AP

During my recent trip to the Middle East, where I visited a refugee camp – the fallout of conventional warfare – I brought along More on War by Martin van Creveld, an Israeli military historian best known for his 1991 book, The Transformation of War – from conventional warfare to terrorism. More on War is an update on the theories of war by two classical thinkers, fifth-century-BC Chinese strategist Sun Tzu and the 19th-century Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz.

Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un: a war of words

Sun Tzu’s Art of War is a classic, because he was the first to think through the psychological part of strategy, that is, in order to win, a person must not only understand the enemy, but most of all, understand and master themselves. Clausewitz’s works on war and strategy became the standard text on Western military thinking, placing war within its political context, with tenets such as: “War is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means” or “war, therefore, is an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfil our will”.

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