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Don’t touch that button!

If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.

US President Harry S. Truman, 6 August 1945 (16 hours after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima)

North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.

US President Donald Trump, 9 August 2017, speaking to reporters at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

Truman’s measured warning to Japan (followed three days later by a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki when Japan’s military rulers refused to surrender), and Trump’s off-the-cuff threats to North Korea seventy-two years later, are eerily similar in form, but they are very different in context. Truman was speaking at the culmination of the greatest war in history, with more than 40 million people already dead. Trump was making nuclear threats in a confrontation where nobody’s been killed yet (though millions might be, almost all of them non-American) — and if you look at the video, he was clearly enjoying the moment.

The chaos of Donald Trump’s White House, his visible contempt for the Republican leadership in Congress, and his famously short attention span all suggest that he will have only a limited impact on domestic affairs in the United States, but in foreign policy American presidents have virtually free rein. As a candidate he was isolationist, promising to cut back sharply on America’s overseas commitments, and to a certain extent he has delivered on those promises as president. He has withdrawn from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement (TPP), probably killing it in the process (although Japan is trying hard to revive it in a shrunken form), and he has put its European equivalent, the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), on indefinite hold. He has pulled out of the Paris climate accord, and he threatens to end the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) if it is not rewritten to his liking. His attitude to America’s most important alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), is ambivalent at best. But he has doubled down on America’s overseas military commitments.

The [Iraq] war’s a total disaster. It’s a catastrophe … How do they get out? They get out, that’s how they get out. Declare a victory and leave.

Donald Trump with Wolf Blitzer, CNN Live, 16 March 2007

I will never send our finest into battle unless necessary, and I mean absolutely necessary, and will only do so if we have a plan for victory with a capital V. The world must know that we do not go abroad in search of enemies.

Donald Trump, 27 April 20161

Trump was quite right to condemn the foolish and unnecessary wars launched by his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, but it took just a few whiffs of the intoxicating air in the Oval Room for him to be seduced into reinforcing those failures himself: more troops for Afghanistan, more troops in Iraq, more troops and a pointless cruise missile strike against Syria. As he has said himself, ‘I am the greatest hawk who ever lived, a far greater hawk even than Bush. I am the most militant military human being who ever lived.’2 His pugnacious character and the endless opportunities to grandstand have also drawn him into a major and potentially nuclear confrontation with North Korea, and a close alliance with Saudi Arabia that could involve the United States in a war with Iran. He has served a useful purpose in alerting us to the anger of the ‘left-behinds’, but he could also be the first man to start a nuclear war.

The Korean peninsula is the only part of the world where you can currently write a plausible scenario for the outbreak of a nuclear war, and it certainly wouldn’t be North Korea that starts it. The North Korean regime is absolutely determined to have both nuclear weapons and the ability to deliver at least a few of them on the United States, but that is not because Kim Jong-un wants to attack the US. It is because he and his colleagues, like his father and his grandfather before them, want to deter the US from using nuclear weapons on North Korea. There has never been the slightest sign that Trump understands this basic fact.

As Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, said of the North Korean leaders in September 2017, ‘They would rather eat grass than give up their nuclear programme.’ Putin was consciously borrowing the phrase ‘eat grass’ from Pakistan’s former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who said, ‘We will eat grass, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own’ after India exploded its first ‘peaceful nuclear device’ (that is, an atomic bomb) in 1974. If your adversary has nuclear weapons, you cannot afford not to have them — and the United States, not South Korea, is North Korea’s main adversary in the Korean peninsula.

The United States has had nuclear weapons since before the ‘Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’ (North Korea) even came into existence, and for all but the past dozen years of that time North Korea had none. There was no peace treaty at the end of the Korean War (1950–53), only an armistice, so the two Koreas are still technically at war — and the United States has never promised not to use nuclear weapons on North Korea if major fighting breaks out again in the Korean peninsula. Indeed, it has come close to using them there in the past.

During the Korean War (1950–53), General Douglas MacArthur, the American commander in the Far East, considered going nuclear on several occasions. In October 1950, after his forces had recovered from an initial defeat, overrun most of North Korea, and advanced almost all the way to the Chinese border, MacArthur was surprised (though he shouldn’t have been) by a large Chinese force that counter-attacked from across the border. As American troops fled south in the ‘Big Bug-Out’, he came up with a cunning plan to stop the Chinese: ‘It was my plan as our [troops retreated] to spread behind us — from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea — a belt of radioactive cobalt. It could have been spread from wagons, carts, trucks, and planes … For at least 60 years there could have been no land invasion of Korea from the north. The enemy could not have marched across that radiated belt.’3

Like most American soldiers of his generation (he fought on the Western Front in the First World War), General MacArthur was simultaneously in awe of nuclear weapons and quite ignorant about the niggling details — such as the fact that there was not enough refined cobalt-60 in the world to carry out even one-hundredth of his plan. Later in the war, he at least contemplated the use of nuclear weapons on China, although there is no evidence that he ever recommended it to President Truman. The president ultimately dismissed him for insubordination, and it all happened a long time ago — but there can be no doubt that every generation of North Korean leaders and soldiers since then has been taught about MacArthur’s plan. (The same goes for the Chinese.) Like the Pakistanis after India’s first nuclear test, the North Koreans felt naked and utterly vulnerable until they got nukes of their own. It just took the North Koreans a lot longer to get there.

The writer … is not for the moment concerned about who will win the next war in which atomic bombs are used. Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other useful purpose.

Bernard Brodie, 19464

I interviewed Bernard Brodie in the last year of his life, and he was filled with remorse for the many years he had spent playing with concepts of ‘limited’ nuclear war in the 1950s and 1960s, but he was right at the first and he was right again by the end. In the winter of 1945–46, only months after the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Brodie led a group of young American academics in a study of what would be the appropriate strategy for a world of nuclear-armed great powers, and they concluded that the only useful role for nuclear weapons was deterrence. Fighting a nuclear war would cause death and damage on an unthinkable scale, far exceeding the importance of whatever issues were at stake, and so American nuclear weapons had to remain unused — but they had to remain in existence, protected from a surprise attack, to deter other similarly armed countries from launching a nuclear ‘first strike’ against the United States. Brodie was the father of the deterrence theory that now rules strategic thinking in all the nuclear-weapons powers — but it was at least fifteen years before his own country adopted his ideas.

This was only to be expected, because until the first Soviet nuclear test in 1949 the United States was the only nuclear-weapons power in a world of conventional weapons, and even down to the end of the 1950s America’s nuclear weapons were so numerous and its delivery systems so superior that it could effectively ‘win’ a nuclear war against the Soviet Union. This was what seduced Brodie in mid-career into exploring theories of ‘limited’ nuclear war that would exploit this transitory American dominance in these weapons, to his later regret. By the mid-1960s, however, both the United States and the Soviet Union had large numbers of unstoppable ballistic missiles, and the doctrine of mutual deterrence had been accepted by pretty much the entire American strategic community.

The strategic relationship between the United States and North Korea as regards nuclear weapons has not yet reached this relatively stable end-point. North Korea’s nuclear weapons are new, and perhaps not very reliable. They are certainly few in number. The same applies to North Korean intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), which are in their initial flight-test phase and have only recently achieved the range needed to reach all parts of the United States. So there is not yet full mutual deterrence between the two countries, and the United States, as in the early days of the Cold War vis-a-vis its Soviet opponent, does have the option of launching a massive nuclear first strike against North Korea that might destroy all its nuclear weapons and missiles, and decapitate its leadership. Or it might fail to achieve these objectives — the outcome is inherently unpredictable — and one or several North Korean nuclear weapons might survive and explode on American soil. A similar level of uncertainty was enough to prevent the United States from seriously considering a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union even in the 1950s, and it should have the same effect today. It would take a very rash or ignorant leader to take such a gamble — but such leaders do exist. Some of them sound like angry children in the playground.

The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea. Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.

Donald Trump speaking at the UN General Assembly, 19 September 2017

[Trump] is surely a rogue and a gangster fond of playing with fire, rather than a politician … I will surely and definitely tame the mentally deranged US dotard with fire.

Kim Jong-un’s personal response, 21 September 20175

Kim Jong-un of North Korea, who is obviously a madman who doesn’t mind starving or killing his people, will be tested like never before!

Trump tweet, 3.28 am, 22 September 2017

The vast majority of Americans are blissfully unaware that there is any hypocrisy involved in demanding that North Korea refrain from getting what the United States has had for the past seventy-three years, and the US government is equally oblivious to the double standards on display. US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was being entirely sincere when he said that North Korea’s ICBM test ‘represents a new escalation of the threat to the United States, our allies and partners, the region, and the world’. Wrong, but entirely sincere.

The United States has at least a hundred times as many nuclear weapons as North Korea, and delivery vehicles that are at least two technological generations further down the road. It also has a clearly stated policy that it might use nuclear weapons first in a conflict. In practice, it would only ever exercise this option against relatively small and weak countries; it would never launch a first strike against a fully fledged nuclear-weapons power such as Russia or China, because the retaliation would cause massive devastation in the United States. Unfortunately for North Korea, it is a relatively small and weak country. Pyongyang is obviously well aware of this, and quite frightened by it. It blusters and lies a lot, partly because it is so frightened and partly because that is the house style anyway, but it would never launch a nuclear first strike against the United States or its allies. That really would be a suicide mission.

North Korea will probably have ICBMs that can reach big American cities with a fair degree of accuracy in a year or two if it keeps up its current pace of development and testing. That would buy it a limited degree of safety from an American nuclear attack, because one or more of its missiles might survive a US first strike and be able to carry out a ‘revenge from the grave’. But even full-range nuclear-tipped ICBMs would still not allow North Korea to launch a nuclear attack on America (or on South Korea, which has an American nuclear guarantee) without being exterminated in an immediate, massive nuclear counter-strike. So you can probably trust the North Korean regime not to do anything so terminally stupid — unless people like Kim Jong-un are literally crazy.

That’s why American diplomats work so hard to convince everybody else that the North Korean regime really is frothing mad, impervious to logic, a threat to the whole world, and not even interested in self-preservation. Only then can they argue that the North Koreans should be denied nuclear weapons, although Americans, Russians, Chinese, British, French, Israelis, Indians, and Pakistanis can be trusted with them. There is no evidence that the North Koreans really are crazy. In the sixty-five years since the end of the Korean War, they have never risked a war, and they are extremely unlikely to do so now. And while there is a leader in Washington at the moment whose taste in personal abuse rivals that of the North Korean leader, people want to believe that there is enough adult supervision in the White House to avoid any fatal mistakes on the American side either.

Washington gossip is often just wishful thinking, but reports began surfacing in late 2017 that the US Secretary of Defense, General James Mattis, the National Security Advisor, General H.R McMaster, and Trump’s Chief of Staff, General John Kelly, have made a secret pact that they would never be abroad at the same time. That would be comforting if it were true, because it would mean that at least one very senior military officer would always be in the country to monitor orders coming from the White House, and countermand them if necessary. Unfortunately, there are two reasons to doubt this. First, it’s only a rumour. Second, only Mattis is in the chain of command, and any countermanding orders he might issue would probably arrive too late.

‘The president has absolute authority, unilateral power, to order the use of nuclear weapons,’ says Bruce Blair, who was once a launch-control officer for Minuteman ICBMs, and later founded Global Zero, a group that advocates eliminating nuclear weapons entirely. The nuclear codes that the president would punch into the ‘football’ (the device controlling nuclear-weapons launches that an aide always carries around close to the president) are ‘the length of a tweet. It would take them one or two minutes to format and transmit that directly down the chain of command to the executing commanders of the underground launch centers, the submarines, and the bombers.’ Mattis and various other generals would get the order, too, of course — but, as Blair says, ‘If they felt that it was a really bad call or illegal, and they wanted to try to override it, they could try to transmit a termination order, but it would be too late.’6

This bizarre situation dates back to the early days of the Cold War, when both the United States and the Soviet Union had ‘launch-on-warning’ policies because they feared that an enemy first strike could destroy all of their own nuclear weapons and leave them helpless. ‘Use ‘em or lose ‘em’ was the mantra, so the US and Soviet leaders had the authority to launch their missiles in minutes. Later on, both countries buried their ballistic missiles in underground silos or hid them in submerged submarines so they could not lose them in a surprise attack. They no longer had to launch on a warning that might be false: if there really was an attack, they could ride it out and retaliate afterwards. But the US never bothered to take back the president’s ‘instant launch’ authority. Donald Trump really could make a nuclear first strike on North Korea all on his own — and Kim Jong-un could presumably do the same thing in the other direction. On this vital issue, there is no ‘adult supervision’.

We can’t blame Trump for being president when the North Korean nuclear and missile programmes finally came to fruition. We can regret that it was Trump, because his predecessors, both Republican and Democratic, understood that if sanctions didn’t succeed in stopping North Korea, there was nothing further to be done unless they were willing to attack North Korea with nuclear weapons themselves. Trump sometimes seems not to understand that this is a dreadful option, as he has been quoted on a number of occasions asking his advisers why the United States doesn’t use them, but it makes no sense to fight a real nuclear war now in order to prevent an imaginable but highly unlikely nuclear war sometime in the future.

We live in dangerous times, but there is probably not going to be a Second Korean War. North Korea will probably get an effective nuclear deterrent force in the end, and we will all probably learn to live with it — just as we learned to live with mutual US–Russian nuclear deterrence, mutual US–Chinese nuclear deterrence, and mutual Indian–Pakistani nuclear deterrence. And if, by great misfortune, there should be renewed war in the Korean peninsula and nuclear weapons are used, it would not be the continent-killing disaster that loomed over everybody in the decades of the Cold War. It would, however, be an unlimited calamity for Koreans, both North and South, of whom millions might die, and a very frightening time for everybody else.

The United States and the United Nations Security Council sought, over many years, to stop Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons with a wide array of strong economic sanctions. But the previous administration lifted these sanctions, just before what would have been the total collapse of the Iranian regime, through the deeply controversial 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. This deal is known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. As I have said many times, the Iran deal was one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into.

Donald Trump speech, 13 October 2017

Trump’s response to North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile tests may be reckless and bellicose, but he is at least responding to a real problem. In trying to destroy the JCPOA, signed by all the world’s nuclear-armed great powers plus Germany in 2015, he is creating a problem where none existed before. (And no, the Iranian regime was not on the brink of collapse when the deal was signed.)

The escalating economic sanctions that the UN Security Council imposed on Iran after it refused to suspend its uranium-enrichment activities in 1996 culminated successfully in Iran’s signature of the JCPOA treaty in 2015, but what that deal stopped was not Iran’s pursuit of actual nuclear weapons. That had already ceased in 2003. Instead it obliged Iran to abandon, at least for ten years, its attempts to achieve what is known as ‘threshold’ status: the technical ability to break out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty’s constraints and develop a nuclear-weapons capability quickly — within one or two years — were one of the country’s nuclear-armed near neighbours to suddenly turn hostile. Those neighbours include Pakistan (which shares a common border with Iran), Israel, Russia, and the United States’ Fifth Fleet (based in Bahrain).

In most parts of the world, threshold status is not a big deal. Germany, Japan, Argentina, Brazil, and the Netherlands are all threshold nuclear-weapons powers: they could produce enough enriched uranium for a bomb in a year, although it would take them several years to produce an actual weapon. Canada, Belgium, Italy, Spain, and Australia are in the same category, though it would take a little longer, and South Africa presumably retains a threshold capability, although it has dismantled the nuclear weapons it built in the late apartheid years. So why hasn’t the UN Security Council brought sanctions against them, too? Because their enrichment facilities are perfectly legal under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which they have all signed. Iran’s enrichment facilities are equally legal, and it has also signed the NPT. Countries that exercise their right to enrich uranium have to allow inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to ensure that they are not enriching it to weapons grade, and for the past decade and a half, Iran has abided by the letter of those rules.

However, the United States government does not trust the Iranians. Even more to the point, Israel does not trust them, and Israel has great, perhaps decisive, influence in Washington on this question. So the United States demanded that Iran stop enriching uranium even to the level (2.5 per cent pure) that is needed for nuclear-power reactors. If Iran could do even a little bit of enrichment, Washington argued, that would give it the ability to enrich uranium all the way up to weapons grade (90 per cent pure), and to make nuclear weapons sometime in the future. In other words, Iran would have to accept special constraints, well beyond the NPT rules, because it was untrustworthy. The Iranians were understandably outraged by this, but there is a good deal of history here: Iran has sought nuclear weapons in the past.

Shortly after the Islamic Revolution of 1978–79 brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power in Tehran, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Iran in 1980 with tacit encouragement from the United States. Both countries assumed that Iran’s shaky new revolutionary regime would crack quickly, but the war turned into an eight-year battle of attrition in which more than a million soldiers died in the trenches. Poison gas was used extensively by the Iraqi side, and by the end, in 1988, the US Defense Intelligence Agency was giving the Iraqi intelligence services detailed information, including satellite imagery, on the deployments and movements of all Iranian combat units. This gave the Iraqi air force ‘targeting packages’, in the words of retired US Air Force Col. Rick Francona, who was a military attaché in Baghdad during the 1988 strikes, that included sarin (nerve gas). ‘The Iraqis never told us that they intended to use nerve gas,’ said Francona. ‘They didn’t have to. We already knew.’7

The Iranians knew that Iraq was also working on nuclear weapons, and had no doubt that it would use them as soon as it got them. By 1984, Iranian leaders were so concerned about an Iraqi nuclear bomb that they authorised a comparable Iranian nuclear-weapons programme, but that lost speed and may even been shut down entirely for a time after the end of the war in 1988, or at the latest when the Iraqi programme was dismantled by UN inspectors after the Gulf War of 1990–91. However, Iran resumed development work on nuclear weapons in 1998, after Pakistan tested six nuclear bombs in three days.

Pakistani regimes, whether civilian or military, are not particularly hostile to Iran as a rule, but the Pakistani military, almost uniquely among the armed forces of Muslim-majority countries, allows Islamists to rise to high rank. The possibility that extreme Islamist officers might someday seize power in Islamabad is therefore never absent from Iranian calculations. As fanatical Sunnis, those officers would be deeply hostile to Shia Iran, and now they would have nuclear weapons as well. Iran might need a nuclear deterrent against Pakistan at some future time, the thinking went, so it should at least have a threshold nuclear capability, even though it did not need the actual weapons immediately.

That drive for a threshold capability lasted until 2002, when The National Council of Resistance in Iran, the political wing of the terrorist organisation Mujahideen-e Khalq (MeK), revealed that Iran was building secret nuclear facilities near Natanz and Arak. (The information may have been leaked to them by US intelligence.) The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) investigated, and in mid-2003 Tehran agreed to suspend its uranium enrichment activities and ratify an additional protocol requiring Iran to provide an expanded declaration of its nuclear activities and granting the IAEA broader rights of access to sites in the country. That was the end of the ‘threshold’ programme, and in November 2007 all sixteen US intelligence agencies contributed to a National Intelligence Estimate saying that Iran had stopped work on nuclear weapons in 2003. Everybody except Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu agrees that it has not resumed work since.

At no time have Iran’s nuclear-weapons ambitions had anything to do with Israel. The Islamic Republic of Iran strongly disapproves of Israel’s actions, of course. In 2005, one president, the obnoxious and bombastic Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, even quoted the late Ayatollah Khomeini’s religious judgement that ‘this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time’. But contrary to persistent Israeli propaganda, Ahmadinejad never said that Israel should be wiped from the map, let alone that Iran could or should be the country that made it happen. In fact, most Iranians do not worry at all about Israel’s hundreds of nuclear weapons and multiple means of delivery, against which Iran has no plausible defence. That reality has been a constant since all but the oldest Iranians were children, and the unspoken assumption is that the Israelis are a relatively predictable and unthreatening enemy. Or at least that was the case until Netanyahu started trying to persuade the United States to join Israel in a joint attack on all of Iran’s nuclear facilities.

He got nowhere with president Barack Obama in that enterprise, and even Donald Trump does not say that Iran is now working on nuclear weapons. The conclusion of the JCPOA treaty in 2015 imposed severe restrictions for at least ten years on Iranian activities that might be related to nuclear weapons, and gave unprecedented access to IAEA inspectors to ensure that the Iranians are complying with them. In return, Iran has been released from all UN sanctions, presumably to the ultimate benefit of Iran’s sagging economy.

Netanyahu continues to rail against the deal, but his own soldiers and intelligence services disagree with him. General Gadi Eizenkot, the chief of the Israel General Staff, said in 2016 that, ‘Without a doubt the nuclear deal between Iran and the West is a historic turning point. It is a big change in terms of the direction that Iran was headed, and in the way that we saw things.’ Ephraim Halevy, the former chief of Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, Mossad, issued a similar assessment: ‘I believe this agreement closes the roads and blocks the road to Iranian nuclear military capabilities for at least a decade. And I believe that the arrangements that have been agreed between the parties are such that [they] give us a credible answer to the Iranian military threat, at least for a decade, if not longer.’8 Yet Netanyahu still insists that it is a ‘historic mistake’, and demands that the deal be cancelled and the sanctions restored. It is hard to see how doing that would be beneficial for Israel, since it would free Iran to resume work on nuclear weapons at once if it was so inclined, but Netanyahu’s motives may have more to do with Israel’s domestic politics than with strategic considerations.

President Trump’s decision to ‘decertify’ the JCPOA agreement, which he excoriates as the ‘worst deal ever’, is equally hard to explain. He refers vaguely to minor Iranian ‘violations’ of the deal, but the IAEA and all the other signatories maintain that Iran is in compliance with all the terms. He complains that Iran is breaking the ‘spirit of the deal’, citing its testing of long-range ballistic missiles and its continuing support for the Syrian regime, the Hezbollah party and militia in Lebanon, and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, but the JCPOA did not address those issues at all. As a man with much business experience, good and bad, Trump must know that if it isn’t in the contract, it’s not part of the deal. Even his own secretary of defense, former general Jim Mattis, has told Congress that the deal is in the national-security interest of the United States, and still Trump persists. Why? Perhaps he has been persuaded by Saudi Arabia to take Riyadh’s side in its rivalry with Iran for the role of dominant regional power in the Middle East, but Trump was already promising to break the deal during the election campaign, long before he went to Riyadh. Absent any other plausible explanation, the suspicion must be that it is just part of his obsessive campaign to eradicate every trace of his predecessor’s political legacy. The Iran deal was Barack Obama’s greatest diplomatic accomplishment, so it must be destroyed.

It will not be easily destroyed. Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China, and the European Union have all said that Iran is observing the agreement in good faith, and that they will not revive sanctions against Iran even if the United States does. Iran has said that it will stick by the agreement so long as the other parties do, and indeed it would be foolish to do otherwise. The Europeans, however, might find it hard to stick by that decision in the long run, because any European companies trading with Iran might find themselves banned from trading with the United States, a far bigger market. Even then it would be in Iran’s interest to stay with the deal, but at some point national pride might overcome self-interest.

I have got serious reservations about Donald Trump as President of the United States. The biggest threat the world faces is how we all adjust to the progressive withdrawal of responsible American leadership and the network of alliances that America maintained with Europe, with Asian countries and the partnerships they had across the region.

Sir John Sawyers, former head of the British intelligence agency MI69

A Second Korean War would be a calamity for the Koreans, millions of whom might be killed. If nuclear weapons were used (as they probably would be), it would make the rest of the world a more dangerous place, but it would not become a global catastrophe unless the Chinese were also drawn into the fighting. The odds on that are impossible to calculate, but it is unlikely.

Apart from Korea, the international damage that the Trump administration can do is fairly limited. American withdrawal from the JCPOA agreement would not necessarily lead to Iranian nuclear weapons, and Trump is the least likely American politician to get into a confrontation with Russia. (Indeed, his links with Russia may yet prove to be his downfall.) Even in Syria, where the US army and air force are operating in the same battle space as the Russian air force and Iranian militias, much care is being taken on both sides to avoid misunderstandings and potential confrontations, and in any case the effective collapse of Islamic State means that the worst of the fighting is probably over. It is unnerving to have an erratic narcissist like Donald Trump in such a powerful position, but most other major countries are still committed to the arrangements that have kept the peace between the great powers for so long. No guarantees, of course, but Trump’s time in office could pass without doing any irreversible damage to the current international system.

The greater concern is the fact, or at least the perception, that the world is drifting back into the ultra-nationalist, authoritarian political style — ‘populism’, in a word — that we last saw in the 1930s. There is much more to be said about this, and in particular about the viability of democracy, but first we should look at the practical impact of populism on the politics of one of the oldest democracies: the United Kingdom.