Tim Blair: Trump’s Korean masterpeace exposes his haters
Only the Left is reeling from the miraculous turnaround by North Korea’s dictator in meeting the South Koreans to discuss reducing nuclear arms in their peninsula.
Opinion
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IN LATE 1980, the FM radio station I was listening to followed its news announcement of Ronald Reagan’s US election win with Barry McGuire’s Eve Of Destruction. So witty! So on point! So sharp! And, as events turned out, so … completely wrong!
Still, that was the prevailing wisdom at the time. Reagan was going to cause a global nuclear firestorm, and the best we in Australia could hope for was to ride out the destruction somewhere in the desert before emerging, cockroach-like, to form a tiny feudal society of warring mutants.
You know, something along the lines of Mad Max. Or the Greens, in their present fractious condition.
I still feel cheated that it never happened.
Instead of provoking nuclear conflict, Reagan’s first-term arms build-up was part of an economic strategy aimed at bankrupting the Soviet Union. As the Soviets attempted to match Reagan’s military spending, their resources were driven further down.
This wasn’t a clash of superpowers (it couldn’t be, given that the USSR’s total wealth at the time was equal merely to California’s).
It was a straight-up battle between ideologies — capitalism versus communism. Whichever side was able to generate and spend the most money would win. Reagan prevailed.
Rather than casting the world to oblivion, he ended the Cold War — or at least established the circumstances that in 1991 saw communism’s European collapse.
Those geopolitical genii running FM radio stations must have been devastated. Nearly four decades later, we’re witnessing something very similar unfold.
President Donald Trump was expected by many to unleash a nuclear hellstorm involving North Korea, and sooner rather than later.
“The risk has long been real — and in 2018, with Donald Trump in the White House, it is alarmingly high,” former Labor leader Kim Beazley and Perth-based think-tank veteran L. Gordon Flake wrote in March.
“Events unfolding on the Korean Peninsula and in Washington are pointing in a direction that is difficult, but essential, to contemplate.”
To the contrary, quite a few observers found it very easy indeed to contemplate a Trump-led thermonuclear holocaust.
Consider these headlines, all of them from just this year: “Trump goes it alone on North Korea. What could go wrong, other than nuclear war?”; “This is how nuclear war with North Korea would unfold”; “Trump’s North Korea ‘options’ could lead to nuclear war”; “Soros: Trump has US ‘set on a course for nuclear war’”; “Will Trump’s bruised ego launch a nuclear war?”, and “The rising risk of nuclear war under Trump”.
Then North Korea’s Kim Jong-un walked across the border last week, shook hands with South Kosrean President Moon Jae-in and the pair began negotiations to rid their shared peninsula of nuclear weapons.
How had this miraculous turnaround come to be?
“Clearly, credit goes to President Trump,” South Korean foreign minister Kang Kyung-wha told CNN. “He’s been determined to come to grips with this from day one.”
Characteristically, Trump celebrated the occasion with a typical random-capitals tweet.
“After a furious year of missile launches and Nuclear testing, a historic meeting between North and South Korea is now taking place,” the US president wrote. “Good things are happening, but only time will tell!”
Among those potential good things might be a formal end to the war between North and South Korea.
The shooting segment of that war lasted for three years — the TV series MASH, set during the Korean War, ran for four times as long — but no actual peace treaty was ever signed.
It’s sort of like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s marriage to Maria Shriver; split since 2011, but never divorced.
Kim Jong-un briefly skipped back across the border for lunch following that first meeting between the two Korean leaders, presumably because dictator kimchi is yummier than democratic kimchi (as his starving nation’s solitary fatso, Jong-un ought to know). But positivity and optimism abound — except in The New York Times, which finds it even easier to detect downsides with Trump than it found moments to rejoice over President Obama.
According to the NYT, those “vows of peace” in Korea have “complicated Mr Trump’s task as he prepares for his own history-making encounter with Mr Kim”. Really? How so? Because “the talk of peace is likely to weaken the two levers that Mr Trump used to pressure Mr Kim to come to the bargaining table … Mr Trump will find it hard to threaten military action against a country that is extending an olive branch”.
In other words, peace is great and the avoidance of nuclear conflict is totally ace — unless Donald Trump has anything to do with it, in which case peace just “complicates” things.
The world view of the anti-Trump Left is, you might say, on the eve of destruction.
Patio politics can be deadly
I am presently dealing with my own tense Korean scenario.
My backyard patio has become a miniature, bug-populated version of Seoul versus Pyongyang.
All is peaceful at the South Korean end of this personal peninsula. I take my ease there of an evening, reading, listening to rainfall and calling friends.
But I am careful to never cross the demilitarised zone, beyond which point the mud wasps have established full military control. They’ve recently attacked three intruders, including me. They are particularly protective of the clothes line, which seems to have a powerful religious or tactical significance for them.
Consequently, a towel I put there in January remains resolutely in place. I tried hiring a local kid to retrieve it, but word travels fast in this neighbourhood and they know better than to challenge the wildlife over at old man Blair’s joint.
Guess I’ll have to wait for one of my nieces to visit.
The weird thing is, whenever those wasps drift down to my end of the patio, shopping for spiders, they are completely benign. It’s as though they’re on trade missions or something. And then they head north and turn back into an insect Manson family.
At least the lizard situation has improved. I’d previously admired the resourcefulness of these small reptiles, who over summer set up a secure bird-proof base behind some aluminium guttering. They also have immediate access to a brightly painted white wall, allowing easy food-bug detection. Then one night I watched one of them tracking the flight of a mosquito. Closer and closer it flew, and I anticipated an imminent gulping, only for the mosquito to instead smack into the lizard’s nose. Even worse, the distressed creature then ran under cover, probably crying. I tell you, it’s hard to look a lizard in the eye after seeing something like.
But this week came reptile redemption. A lizard, possibly even the same cowardly one, faced a spider’s running attack and didn’t flinch. It bravely held its ground and ate the assailant, despite the spider’s body being larger than the lizard’s mouth.
Maybe I should join a lizard-led anti-wasp coalition. They seem to have this territory figured out.
Dog’s right to free speech
Annoyed by his girlfriend “always ranting and raving about how cute and adorable her wee dog is”, Scotsman Markus Meechan sought to turn the pug “into the least cute thing I could think of, which is a Nazi”.
And he did, training the animal to perform Nazi salutes upon hearing the phrase “Sieg Heil”. Then he filmed the dog and posted his practical joke on YouTube as a laugh.
Last week Meechan, who goes by the online title Count Dankula, was found guilty in a UK court of being “grossly offensive” and fined £800 — close to $1500. But this story may have a happy ending. Meechan immediately launched a crowd funding appeal, not to pay the fine but to challenge his conviction. As of late Sunday, the donation total stood at £153,820. That’s nearly $280,000, which should be enough to hire some very serious lawyers.
Free speech evidently has a great many friends who are willing to put their money on the line. Good.