CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Curveball President

Image Source: How to play baseball, a manual for boys – Public Domain

Last week, in a fit of blue-suit pique, Donald Trump threw a curveball, reversing his take on ideologically indoctrinated North Korea and flicking signals at Kim Jong Un with the glee of a kid discovering a laser pointer.

Remember Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a very different sartorialist—more dark commando chic than preppy shine? He was saying on August 9 that another 30,000-50,000 North Korean troops were about to be sent to Russia to fight Ukraine?

Zelenskyy didn’t dish out evidence, or a timetable, and his claim was brushed off by Pyongyang as “groundless,” but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Fact: North Korean troops are already fighting Ukrainians.

“We never forget until we die!” runs one of Pyongyang’s more memorable slogans. Does it follow that North Koreans chant this in Russia’s Kursk region, just northeast of Sumy, where this fighting has been taking place? Or—and I say this with sympathy—are they more anxious souls than party-line sloganeers?

As for Trump and Korea, Trump literally halted the US-South Korean Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises, describing North Korea as “unthreatening and respectful”? This, while recharging the bromance with Kim Jong Un and huffily berating South Korea for declining to support his increasingly disesteemed war against Iran.

At times on the world carousel, Trump appears afflicted by a kind of brittle willingness to break every status quo within reach. Quite something, when generations of American Foreign Service officers have been educated and trained to believe that South Korea stands on the so-called side of the angels.

Effectively hurling invective at a treaty ally facing a nuclear-armed antagonist—particularly while Pyongyang slow-waltzes militarily to the dirge of Moscow—is not only beyond comprehension, it is supremely dangerous. In fact, a diagnosis of strategic incoherence may be more in line. The exercises ended a full six days early.

For the record, the international case against Kim Jong Un’s regime includes crimes against humanity—political imprisonment, torture, executions, forced labour, sexual violence, disappearances,........

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