As the North Korean nuclear crisis again seems to teeter on the brink of spiraling out of control, given the latest war of words between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un, it's worth pondering whether this whole act is being staged by the Kremlin - as just about anything to do with US security should be suspect these days.
The geopolitical play by Pyongyang seems rather obvious: because the North's principal goal is the ejection of US military forces from the Korean peninsula, its imperative is to make the Trump administration as unpopular, even detested, among the South Korean public as possible. And the only sure way to do this is to taunt The Donald's fragile ego such that the full might of the US military - its massive nuclear arsenal - is brought to bear on the defiant little hermit kingdom which has made a mockery not only of Washington's military superpower credentials, but more generally of the residual Western imperialist footprint in what is more and more rightfully the exclusive home turf of the civilizations and cultures of the Orient.
Indeed, the cost-benefit analysis for Kim is such a no-brainer: without Trump's hubris as the driving force of the standoff, both South Korean and global pressure would instead fall on himself. Knowing full well that neither of his two great patrons - Moscow and Beijing - would tolerate the collapse of his regime, he can rest assured that even the worst of additional sanctions on top of the new ones already approved by Russia and China in the UN Security Council will achieve little of further consequence; as such, he has little to lose by defying the new economic pressure by stirring the pot and trolling his American counterpart in such a way that guarantees it will be the latter who quickly takes on the role of the bigger madman.
But there's one huge risk for the North: Trump might actually just carry through on his verbal threats and turn the tit-for-tat war of words into an actual shooting war of missiles and possibly even nukes. No matter how minuscule the possibility, in any moment of supreme crisis the US commander-in-chief just might "lose it" and override the sober, even grim warnings against war of his military advisers; the buck ultimately stops with The Donald, and for a small rogue state like Pyongyang, that alone can't be a reassuring thought.
Hence, it's legitimate to question whether Vladimir Putin not only has Kim Jong-Un's back against Trumpian Washington, but may in fact be orchestrating the whole Korean crisis behind the scenes. Given the abysmal state of US-Russia relations - a fact of life these days that no degree of personal rapport between Trump and Putin themselves can change - Putin has no more domestic political leeway to refrain from pushing back on American interests wherever he can than the Trussia-tied White House has left to avoid turning Russia into an outright enemy for the first time since the headier days of the Cold War.
This possibility acquires more credence if one considers that, for all his bluster, Kim simply isn't a lunatic: as Trump himself grudgingly admitted, the young strongman must by all means be a skillfully calculating political survivalist - and this can only apply internationally no less than domestically. For Pyongyang to so brazenly provoke a character such as The Donald in such a serial manner, something else might be afoot.
That something else would be that Russia has determined to shrink US strategic and military influence in East Asia now no less than in Europe or the Middle East. Nearly seven months into the Trump administration, it may have settled on this course of action not merely generally because of the drastic deterioration of relations with Washington, but in the Korean context more specifically because the Kremlin has determined that the White House simply lacks the political flexibility to actually resolve the nuclear crisis.
Because the cold hard fact is that the entire issue has slipped well beyond Washington's grasp even a good while before Trump took office: no acceptable military option was ever on the table, and Chinese fear of complete regime collapse in Pyongyang always made sanctions at best a broader strategic restraining (as opposed to reducing) measure. Even without an ego the size of Trump's in the decision-making seat, imperial Washington would have been hard-pressed to have allowed itself to be dragged to the negotiating table with such humiliating opening terms: if complete denuclearization, then complete withdrawal of US troops from the South; if retention of the US presence on the peninsula, then only a freeze of the North's weapons programs.
Trump's ego, alas, appears now to have been the last straw on the camel's back: if before there were still a sliver of hope that the US would come to its senses and finally cut its steadily growing losses, then The Donald's unpredictable explosions of megalomania have snuffed out that glimmer of light as well. For Russia and China, the only option left is to brace themselves for the worst - by proactively shielding the North and not wait until it actually finds itself on the receiving end of US wrath to come to Kim's rescue.
And for Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, that can only mean one thing: make Donald Trump far more hated in South Korea - especially among the young who just swept a dovish Moon Jae-in into office in Seoul - than Kim Jong-Un. Kim can now have free rein to taunt and troll the US taunter- and troll-in-chief himself such that your typical 22-year-old South Korean youth serving out his mandatory term in the DMZ would sooner blame Trump for the risk to his life than the North Korean snipers peering across the no-man's land at him and his buddies. As soon as this shift occurs at a broad or general level, the game is up for the Yankee imperialists and their new redneck cheerleader.
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