Richard Nixon was the self-styled champion of the 'Madman Theory,' which, in a nutshell, is basically this:
Nixon was elected in 1968 by promising that he had a plan to end the Vietnam War. It was a secret plan though, because he claimed that revealing the plan during the campaign would neutralise its impact.
Of course, the "secret" was that Nixon in fact had no plan whatsoever.
And after two years of counterproductive thrashing about in Laos and Cambodia, which saw some 20,000 American troops killed and which only intensified the public clamour to withdraw US troops and end the Vietnam War, Nixon and Kissinger made sweeping
unilateral concessions to North Vietnam, in order to claim that they'd delivered peace in time for the 1972 election.
Little more than two years later, Saigon collapsed at the daintiest North Vietnamese pinprick, buried by the weight of its own incompetence, corruption, and (anti-communist!) constituent resentment.
In terms of his domestic base and rhetorical appeal, Donald Trump has much in common with Tricky [Poor language removed]. But his entire cabinet combined posses at most about 1% of Nixon's intelligence.
The notion that Trump's patently obvious performative "unpredictability" will do anything but guarantee North Korea's successful acquisition of nuclear weapons is nothing more than solipsistic internet WUMming, and not even remotely worthy of actual consideration (to say nothing of how Trump saving face with his manchild voters by passing the buck for the Iran deal onto Congress will only heighten Pyongyang's determination to procede).
The
only thing that has ever brought results with North Korea is diplomacy. I sound like a broken record, but it's worth repeating - since people forget or ignore this - that Clinton came within a hair's breath of a sincere, meaningful deal in 1999 which would have forestalled everything that's happened since. If you look into this in detail, there's little doubt that they really were eager to seal the deal with Washington. But as usual in the United States, all this painstaking progress was immediately sabotaged by the incoming Bush administration, which, with an agreement literally on the table, assigned Pyongyang to the "Axis of Evil" in order to score points with its chud proto-Trumpling domestic base.
It is now regrettably a near certainty that North Korea can no longer dissuaded from proliferation (though they do, predictably unreported, insist that abandoning their nukes is still on the table). But even in light of a nuclear North Korea, diplomacy is the
only option. The United States has created a world where nuclear weapons are the only sure guarantee of national security, and a nuclear North Korea is one of the unfortunate consequences that were made inevitable by shortsighted decisions long ago.
If we are going to have to deal with the US foreign policy debacle that is a nuclear Pyongyang, we'd better make sure that people like Tillerson (or preferably somebody vastly more informed and capable -
like an Ambassador to Seoul or Assistant Sec. State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs) are in constant communication with the regime, because the obverse of having them inside the tent pissing out is just about too dangerous to contemplate.
And no, China is not the magic bullet that people who probably don't even know who Xi Jinping is claim; the last time they agreed to sanctions on the North, they permitted cross-border Chinese businessmen to "voluntarily" observe the embargo, with no additional oversight whatsoever. They loathe Kim Jong Un and his family, but because they are above all desperate to forestall North Korea's complete collapse, they have virtually no leverage, and there are certainly not going to take any risks for the likes of an ill-mannered boy like Trump, who is voluntarily surrendering American power through laziness and stupidity just about everywhere else on the globe.
