Let no one say the Trump Administration has not been creative in foreign policy in its first 100 days. It has created a full-blown crisis over North Korea and it is sustaining it.
The crisis was not caused by North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme. It was caused by what the U.S. Administration says about it. “We won’t allow North Korea to develop nuclear weapons and long-range missiles,” said President Trump. Vice-President Mike Pence warns North Korea not to test America’s resolve.
For a while during the Cold War, the nuclear standoff was almost comfortable. When the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was briefed on the destructive power of the hydrogen bomb, he told his son Sergei, he was so upset that he could not sleep for several nights. But then, he said, he realised that these weapons could never be used and he could sleep again.
Here’s a terrifying prospect: President Donald Trump with his finger on the nuclear button. This erratic narcissist with little knowledge of the world and, according to his former ghost writer, an attention span of five minutes, with the power to set off a nuclear war. This seems unlikely to come about now, with Trump trailing in the polls, but the election is some way off and it cannot be ruled out.
North Korea announces that it has tested a hydrogen bomb. This raises three questions: Is it true? Should we be worried about it? What can we do about it?
Russian aircraft make intrusions into the air space of the Baltic states and skirt the air space of Britain. Russian bombers attack targets in Syria, and America is advised to keep its aircraft out of the way. Russia may have designs on the Baltic States, and is certainly playing a role in Syria. Possibilities arise of a clash that could lead to escalation.
We tend to see new events as a continuation of past ones. The first automobiles were called “horseless carriages”. So the worsening of relations between Western Europe and Russia is called a “new Cold War”
Nuclear weapons have become symbolic weapons, for display only. They are not weapons of war. They have played no part in the wars of the last few decades. When nations felt threatened, they did not look to their nuclear arsenals for a sense of security.
“Where you stand depends on where you sit” is an old maxim of politics. Where Iranians sit is on a lot of history that inclines them to resent and mistrust America and Britain, and mistrust in particular anything that would compromise their freedom of action.