Trump in Asia: On the eve of war
6 November 2017
The conduct of Donald Trump in Japan, the first country visited in his tour of Asia, strongly suggests that he is preparing to launch a war against North Korea.
The US president flew into the Yokata Air Base near Tokyo. Instead of beginning his stay in Japan by meeting with the country’s political leaders, he elected first to speak to an assembly of American military personnel, part of the force being readied to make good his threat to “totally destroy” North Korea with “fire and fury.”
Amid chants of “USA, USA,” he shed his suit jacket and put on an Air Force bomber jacket. He proceeded to deliver a nationalist rant. The United States, he blustered, deploys “the most fearsome fighting force in the history of the world.”
“America’s warriors,” he continued, “are prepared to defend our nation using the full range of our unmatched capabilities. No one—no dictator, no regime and no nation—should underestimate, ever, American resolve.”
In the manner of a mafia don, Trump gloated: “Every once in a while, in the past, they underestimated us. It was not pleasant for them, was it?” In Japan, this comment was widely interpreted as a reference to the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians.
With his statements and demeanour, Trump personifies the decay of American imperialism and the criminal calculation of its strategists that the destruction of yet another impoverished country will provide some respite from its mounting external and internal crises. In American strategic circles, war with North Korea is considered a way of pushing back against the growing influence of China in Asia and signalling that US capitalism will not give up its…