Trump Makes Big North Korean Policy Change via Whiny Post

One of the seemingly infinite indignities of this era where clueless capitalists are ruining everything and demanding to be thanked for it is the existence of TruthSocial, presidential post wire. This is where our supreme capitalist leader shifts the tides of history in between AI images of himself showing George Washington around his new White House ballroom that doesn’t exist yet. Domestic politics is very serious stuff that’s a lot more complex than any social media algorithm could ever convey, to say nothing of the compounding complexities that foreign policy brings to the table, yet I must debase myself and end sentences like the President of the United States is pivoting away from South Korea and towards North Korea, per TruthSocial. I am so tired.

“Based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea,” begins the normal brained president in a post that fundamentally altered American foreign policy, perhaps forever. “I am not happy with the fact that the United States has, long ago, agreed to participate in Joint Military Exercises with South Korea.” This is a rambling preamble that precedes the real news that “based on the fact that it is too late to cancel,” Trump told his empty Pentagon suit full of breakfast gin to “substantially reduce the Joint Military Exercises!” He ended the post with a shot at South Korea over their lack of a desire to join him in losing a war to Iran, doing his clumsy routine of pretending like he isn’t giving away the game as to how shallow he is.

Trump and North Korea is a subject that is difficult to write about, because our history there is sordid and upending standard American foreign policy is not inherently bad and is often good. There are many serious and not so serious angles to this that all intersect in their own distinct ways, and the default American posture towards North Korea is wrapped up in insulting ahistorical jingoism. Our culture makes fun of their culture for being poisoned by propaganda. For believing that Dear Leader can save them from the foreign menace at their doorstep. For disbelieving objective reality and proven science. For being so shallow as to look past their own government fueling a mass slaughter. Americans have been trained to believe that North Koreans come from an alien culture, irrevocably broken by propaganda, unlike us rational Westerners who would never do something so unhinged as to get behind a fascist movement driven by a cult of personality.

The difference between their propaganda and ours is the extreme threat they describe is actually documented in the history books. We look at the current asymmetric disadvantage between the two countries and wonder why they hyper-fixate on us when we’re clearly too wrapped up in our own colonialist bullshit in the Middle East, but the entire Korean peninsula is still home to a generation who remembers a horrible civil war that brought American colonialist brutality to their cities. The Korean War is America’s forgotten war for many shameful reasons, but one is certainly due to our unhinged murder spree and what it said about us as the supposed civilized winners of WWII. We engineered a horrific famine and dropped more bombs on North Korea (635,000 tons and 32,557 tons of napalm) than the entire Pacific theater saw in World War II (503,000 tons).

Historian Charles K. Armstrong estimated that 12% to 15% of the North Korean population was killed in the war, and U.S. Air Force General Curtis “bombs away” LeMay said in 1988 that about 20% of North Korea’s population died “as direct casualties of war or from starvation and exposure.” We have been trained to look at North Korean propaganda about the Great Satan as hyperbolic and comically over-the-top, but it’s not. The threat it identifies is accurate, and their hyperbole is in direct proportion to our barbarity. We’re the ones who have forgotten our past, not them.

And these joint exercises with South Korea every year are inherently escalatory. They make lasting peace more difficult to achieve for a conflict that still has yet to see a peace treaty signed. They hearken back to a darker time when American generals were agitating to drop nuclear bombs on China and the Soviet Union, using the Korean peninsula as a show of carpet-bombing force that ended with 18 out of North Korea’s 22 major cities over 50% destroyed and an estimated 1.6 to 3 million civilian casualties across the North and South. Anything that pushes mankind away from recreating that horror is unambiguously good.

But Trump doesn’t give a shit about any of that. The guy who thinks he can kidnap any head of state he wants is not a pacifist, he did this because Kim Jong Un flattered his ego more than the South Korean government has (I also can’t help but wonder whether all the extreme weapons shortages from the Iran War had a hand in this). Doing a good thing for bad reasons is a classic Trump bomb lobbed into the discourse, and while I understand those on the left saying that arriving at the correct conclusion is good regardless of how we got here, the way we got here means there is no guarantee this is where we will remain. Maybe South Korean President Lee Jae Myung will call Trump up tonight and tell him he heard that Fred Trump really does love him and we’ll be flying B-21 Raiders over Pyongyang by the end of the week.

The problem with doing policy this way, where you don’t do what humans would classify as thinking and just lurch from one synapse fire to the next, is that people will eventually get sick of your shit and deal with someone else. That is the short story of what the entire world is going through in various sell America trades, and the natural questions this TruthSocial post raises in South Korea and Japan about how much they can rely on American leadership is probably being answered in encrypted chats by Chinese and Russian diplomats. Trump truly has abandoned any long-term Asia policy. It’s China’s future now. He threw it and all our missiles away for Benjamin Netanyahu’s fairy tales about an easy war and Kurdish militias that are so nonsensical, Trump didn’t even believe them the first time around.

But this time around is the triumph of conservatism. Of id over mind. Of the white aggrieved male individual over the collective, and a validation of owning the libs as a fundamental governing philosophy. We are watching what this ideology does when it believes itself to be unmoored from any pretense that they have to care about people other than themselves, and it’s really no different from watching a bunch of eight-year-old boys put their father’s oversized clothes on and pretend to be adults. What tomorrow holds is always murky, especially when we are trapped by the whims of a deranged president whose brain is oozing out his ears, but the trend is clear: less American influence in every corner of the world, and fewer countries we can trust to have our backs when we need it, because we’re proving that no one can trust us.