Readers will recall that just before memories of the Confederacy became an existential threat to national unity, Americans were worried about another—and surely more plausible—menace to the United States. In early August, Kim Jong-un, the North Korean dictator who has been successfully testing ballistic missiles, threatened the American territory of Guam, in the western Pacific, with attack. Kim’s nuclear saber-rattling was met with a bellicose response from President Trump, who vowed that any assault on Guam—and by implication, neighboring allies such as Japan and, of course, South Korea—would be met with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.”
Indeed, for a worrisome week, the American press felt the nuclear jitters for the first time since the heyday of the freeze movement in the 1980s. And this time not without reason: North Korea is hurtling steadily toward a deliverable nuclear capacity, and Kim is not just unrelentingly hostile toward the United States—which remains technically at war with Pyongyang since the 1953 armistice—but disconcertingly unpredictable. Even North Korea’s strategic ally and chief trading partner, China, seemed incapable of restraining Kim Jong-un.
At which point, in the parlance of another nuclear standoff, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Kim blinked. He retreated publicly from his threat to attack Guam, and Trump’s brinkmanship appeared to be vindicated. Or so his partisans argued: Unlike his predecessors, who had been grappling diplomatically with North Korea’s nuclear ambitions since the 1990s, Trump called Kim’s bluff with public resolve and a credible threat. And that was that—no more apocalypse, and on to Charlottesville—until last week, when North Korea successfully fired a ballistic missile over Japanese airspace, the first since 2009, and once again, the security and survival of our Asian allies and Pacific territories (not to mention Honolulu and Seattle) became a question mark.
Even at this juncture, it is unlikely that North Korea will pose a palpable threat anytime soon. But it’s clear that its nuclear ambitions are genuine, that American soil may soon lie within Pyongyang’s range, and that Kim Jong-un seems unimpressed by diplomacy.
This may explain why American analysts and statesmen, at the moment, seem equipped only to wring their hands—or better yet, complain about Donald Trump—in pondering the dilemma of Kim’s bomb. The alternatives are almost equally unwelcome. In the midst of his professionally suicidal interview with the American Prospect, the then-White House counselor Stephen Bannon made the obvious point that in the event of a military conflict between North Korea and the United States, “Until somebody . . . shows me that ten million people in Seoul don’t die . . . from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s no military solution. They [sic] got us.” But the fruits of diplomacy, such as they are, have been equally bleak: Since the Clinton administration, the United States has, at best, delayed the progress of North Korea’s nuclear program and, at worst, guaranteed that Pyongyang pays no price for recurrent defiance.
There is another word here for diplomacy, of course, and that is appeasement. And the relevant lesson is the same as Winston Churchill’s wartime description of appeasement: the hope that if one “feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last.” Yet the irony, as Americans must now grasp, is that the instinct to appease, while self-defeating in the long run, is not entirely irrational in the moment. Neville Chamberlain is a foreign-policy folk villain; but when he became prime minister in 1937, memories of the Great War—and 800,000 British military dead, nearly 2 percent of the population—were as fresh as the late 1990s are to us. Contrary to popular myth, Chamberlain and his predecessor Stanley Baldwin had few illusions about the nature of Nazi Germany or Adolf Hitler. But for them, diplomacy/appeasement was a price worth considering to avoid a second, and considerably more destructive, world war.
In that sense, one might argue that our own version of appeasement—it is better to deal with North Korea, directly or indirectly, than to risk a Pacific catastrophe or nuclear conflict—has enjoyed some success: While the problem has festered, it has remained a problem largely in theory, not practice, and bought us time. But Trump’s belligerence—or, depending on your viewpoint, resolve—has yielded rewards as well. If dictators respect power and despise weakness, it is possible that Kim Jong-un’s aspirations have been effectively checked. Or so we may hope.
The point is that while the Kim regime in Pyongyang strikes Americans as surreal, even comic at times, it is no less lethal—and worst of all, dependably volatile. We have glimpsed the abyss. In 1939, as the Germans crossed the frontier into Poland, the League of Nations was debating the codification of level-crossing signs. Is it smarter to be thinking the unthinkable about the North American continent, or shouting in rage about Robert E. Lee?
Philip Terzian is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
