Trump's strategy is chaos

"And ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet."    King James version, Matthew 24: 6

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson says he's a moron, Senator Bob Corker says he's a child.  Maybe it is actually all going according to plan.  Maybe Trump is just playing with matches, and maybe that is actually the strategy.   Maybe there won't be a fire.

One of the useful rules of thumb that has emerged from these Two Years of Trump is the notion that we should take Trump seriously, but not literally.  Trump doesn't use words in the careful way that people do when making promises, declaring policy, or writing contracts.  Trump is signaling.  He is messaging.  He communicates mood and impression, not details. 

He is negotiating.

Trump's communication style meets the needs of a audience or sympathetic voters, but it frustrates a press corps or a Department of State.  The policy elites want precision.  Trump gives them mood.   And in this case, Trump is communicating with Iran and North Korea.  The distinction between serious and literal is not just Trump.  One of the ongoing themes of this blog is that, in fact, non verbal communication is the primary way that most human interaction takes place.  Contracts written by lawyers are the exception, not the rule, and in everyday life the difference between literal and serious is in fact the way most communication--and all important communication--happens.

Example from work life:  A subordinate enters the boss' office and asks if the report he provided the day before, explaining why his department had unexpected problems, was satisfactory.  The boss looks up, pauses, then says with a flat voice.  "Yeah, I got it.  It's OK."  Then the boss swivels in his chair, turning away, picks up the phone and begins dialing it, in effect wordlessly dismissing the subordinate.   The literal meaning of the interaction was report received and it is OK, but the real meaning of the interaction is that the boss is displeased and it is not at all OK.

Example from home:  A wife gives "the cold shoulder", and it is so well understood there is a phrase for the cliche, the cold shoulder speaking louder than words.

On the surface Trump is threatening war and chaos in the Middle East, blowing up the Iran deal, and simultaneously threatening war with North Korea, implying that our nuclear bombs can do an instant first strike on North Korea and deliver a knockout punch.  Trump communicates he is fed up.  It is the calm before the storm in the Middle East, he said, and we have no choice but war with North Korea, no use even talking.

The Defense and Foreign Policy experts are nearly unanimous that disrupting the Iran deal would be a disaster, and I have found nobody--zero--who writes that a first strike nuclear attack on North Korea could be successful. The Iran deal was not a bilateral arrangement. It was made in cooperation with our allies.  Backing out of the Iran deal would not re-establish sanctions on Iran, but it would release them to do exactly what we don't want, re-start a nuclear weapon program.  

Click Here: No such thing as a "surgical strike."

Defense analysts on North Korea observe we cannot eliminate North Korea's weapons of mass destruction.  It is not a matter of do we want to.  We simply cannot physically do it.  We could successfully kill a great many North Korean civilians but we could not destroy dozens of well hidden and sheltered chemical and nuclear weapons.  We would have whatever satisfaction we got from killing North Koreans, but it would come at the cost of millions of deaths from our allies, and likely American mainland cities.  Not "just" Anchorage or Honolulu.   San Francisco.  New York.

(Oh, yes, New York and DC.  Look at a globe.  It is scarcely any further from North Korea to New York than it is to Los Angeles, going over the North Pole, as an ICBM would.  Americans would not just be bystanders at an execution.)

There is a simple reality here which everyone around Trump understands: that it is not in America's interest to go to war.

So there is a premise here: that Trump knows what he is doing, that he is doing big talk, playing the "bad cop" in a negotiation.  The dispute with Secretary of State Tillerson is staged, to give credibility to the madman Trump ploy.  The premise is that our foreign policy is actually strategic and thought out.  Under no plausible circumstance is it in Trump's interest to initiate a nuclear war in which fifty million Americans die, our economy destroyed, our markets in turmoil, China and Europe immediately displace the US as the world economic and political leader, and the area around America's biggest cities be uninhabitable for years due to radiation.  It makes America weak and poor, not great.

Click for Washington Post article

War is is not in America's interests or Trump's interest, therefore it is not the plan.  The plan is a negotiation, a new deal of some sort.  What is going on need not be careless risk taking.  In the final episodes of The West Wing such a ploy was posited in the plot.  Hurry some negotiation because the incoming president was presumably more carelessly hawkish than lame duck incumbent Jeb Bartlett.   Of course, a negotiation like this only works if people in Iran and North Korea have genuine concern that it may not be a ploy, that Trump is just that crazy and reckless.  

This could be statecraft, policy, and negotiating theater.  Body language. "The end is not yet."

This is credible as policy because it is dangerous and great countries are not expected to do foolish, crazy things if led by rational people.  But accidents sometimes do happen.  Actions are misinterpreted.  Kim Jong Un has access to what Americans have access to.  He reads that Trump is considering a first strike nuclear attack.   Nuclear actors need to act quickly, or else the other gets in a surprise first kill.  No time to think.   

That is where the danger is.