North Korea is in the Power Position. Not the USA.

The USA is vulnerable, and North Korea knows it.   

Everyone dies.  Everyone.

This blog looks at strategy and messaging.  I am doing it again, here.  

This time it is not about the real meaning and import of Trump and how others related to him.  Instead, it is about the real strengths and vulnerabilities of American supposed "hyper power."  Sometimes the thing that looks stupid is actually smart. Sometimes the player who looks strong is actually weak.

It turns out Hillary was weak and crazy-Trump was strong.  In this case it turns out that the USA is in the weak position and North Korea is strong.   The people running American foreign and military policy have known it  for decades.  It is time the US public realize it, too.

Ride to doomsday.

After World War 2, early in the Cold War, before we understood it as parity and a stable stalemate, there was lots of fear.  The Soviets might get the bomb and use it.  There might be some new, terrible weapon to be invented.  The world of the 1950s was full of civil defense warnings, Senate hearings about spies and communist infiltrators, books and movies about the end of the world.

That ended by the mid-1960s.

Unacceptable

We got into a comfortable habit during the second half of the Cold War.   We accepted the safety of Mutually Assured Destruction.  We thought it was a kind of chess match, white vs. black, with two essentially equal players, playing by the same rules.  The rules had a premise  that neither team wanted to die and neither team wanted to put the other team in the position of it being better to die than to live.  So we were careful with each other, growling at a safe distance.

Americans got comfortable with the Soviets.  We were face to face against an authoritarian state.  Whatever else, we figured, the government had command and control in place.  They were a rational actor.  Rational people do not want to die, to have their families killed, and to have everything the know and love obliterated.  One cannot lead the triumph of global communism if obliterated.  The Soviets wanted to live.

North Korea is not the USSR.   

North Korea has underground bunkers for its leaders and for a great many of its people.  They have subway civil defense stations 350 feet underground.   They are prepared for total war.  They plan to survive a nuclear exchange.  There are casualties in war and North Korea is ready to pay the price, like Churchill in 1940, preparing for fighting on the beaches, on the landing grounds, on the fields and streets and hills, and shall never surrender.  

In contrast, the United States is petrified by war and the potential of losing American lives. To us it is unacceptable.  Seattle or San Francisco are at risk. The news stories gloss over the potential of deaths in Alaska and Hawaii.  (Trump already established that those two states are outposts, not really homeland.  Hawaii is almost Kenya.)    The maps on the news show bombs hitting "real" America, the continental United States.  We cannot accept the loss of ten million people.

We are in this position because of treaty alliances with Japan and South Korea.  For decades we demonstrated that the US, indeed, negotiates with hostage takers because we have done exactly that, stymied by North Korea because for decades Seoul was a hostage to the North Koreans.  Seoul is indefensible, a mega city of 25 million people close to the North Korean border.   America has pledged to its defense.   

Of course, except for Americans of Korean extraction, no American cares very much about Seoul.   If 25 million Koreans are killed it would be front page news, and indeed the lead story unless the Super Bowl was playing.  The Breaking News on cable would be America's response to the destruction and what it would mean for America, not that 25 million South Koreans had died.   But we had a treaty and America would lose face if we said, oh, never mind, destroy our trusting dependent ally.

Not just thinkable.  Popular.

But now the game has changed.  San Francisco is now a hostage.   America is extraordinarily fragile.  Our economy and culture are a fine and delicate web of connections.  Our elections can be disturbed by fabulous stories posted on Facebook that go viral.   Our economy stops if the power goes off.   Our prosperity is built around complexity, speed, efficiency--not robust early 20th Century steel and simple repairable machines.

It is all digitalized, everything is stored in the cloud, everything has to work or else everything stops.

And then, of course, there are the American lives.  America mourned 3000 people on 9-11 and a handful of people here and there by domestic terrorists.  The news focus makes death by enemies a thousand times more significant than deaths from other means.  Some 50,000 people a year die from heroin overdoses--a 9-11 event every 20 days--but it is something to haggle over in a negotiating point while repealing Obamacare.  Murders at the Boston Marathon or in San Bernardino are treated as horrific.

America will not take casualties, so we are vulnerable to a hostage-taker's threats.

North Korean gift to San Francisco: ICMBs

The threatened target is San Francisco, an interesting choice.   Would red-state America actually mind terribly if San Francisco suffered a nuclear attack?  They would act as if they cared, no doubt.   No Fox News commentator would dare smirk about such a loss, but a great many people would see it as God's hand at work destroying the symbol of American liberal decadence, and the perfect excuse to bomb North Korea, an excuse they have wanted for a decade.  

A repeated meme by Trump supporters is that Trump didn't really lose the popular vote, not really.  Sure, he lost nationally by 3 million votes but he lost California by 4 million votes, so subtract out California, dominated by those crazy liberals in the greater San Francisco Bay area,  and Trump actually won "America", the real America.  

Does that mean that the USA will willingly sacrifice ten million Americans?  No.  

Red state America may sneer at San Francisco (sneer back, as they see it) but in fact it would be unacceptable.  San Franciscans may be liberal but they are, at bottom, Americans, one of us.  Plus, it would throw America in to deep recession, and the costs to the rest of the country in reconstruction would be tremendous.  

Americans have lost their taste for war sacrifice.   We want to live.  We want to look stuff up on Google (Mountain View) and share information on Facebook (Menlo Park) and Twitter (San Francisco).  We cannot lose the San Francisco Bay area.   A nuclear exchange with North Korea is unthinkable, for us, but not for the people who are the decision makers in North Korea.   They think they are under attack.  They think that the US would bomb them to smithereens if we ever got a chance to do it.  They refuse to be the victim.  They know America's allies and now cities are the potential victim.

North Korea is in the strong position and the USA is in the weak one because they can shoot the hostages and be proud of it,  and we will do anything to keep them from shooting them.