February 2018 Philadelphia Chapter of Pax Christi U.S.A.
The following article was posted on January 31st, 2018, in the Santa Maria Sun - Volume 18, Issue 48
Imagine walking into a doctor’s office with a glaring, malignant growth on your face. He responds: “Oh, I can remove that!” Then he does, and sends you home without further attention.
Would you be satisfied? Consider yourself healed? Or would you sense confusion between the symptom of your illness and its cause?
Therein lies an analogy for how concern over the fitness of Donald Trump to serve as president masks what really infects our democracy and threatens our national well-being.
Questioning of the president’s emotional stability has been heightened by his handling of the rising nuclear threat from North Korea. Indeed, Trump outdid himself with one of his first tweets in 2018, claiming his nuclear button is “bigger” than the leader of North Korea’s. Trump made this tweet on Jan. 2 in response to Kim Jong Un’s address to his country on New Year’s Day. The tweet set off alarms about worldwide nuclear annihilation.
But does this tweet indicate that a raving madman occupies the Oval Office?
First, consider Trump’s psycho-logical fitness. Whatever signs of psychosis the president has presented since he took office a year ago should be put in perspective of the mental state of other modern presidents. Consider the obsession of Lyndon Johnson, who was blind to the realities of the Vietnam War and fell into depression before the eyes of the country; the paranoia of Richard Nixon, who was haunted by imaginary conspiracies trying to undermine him; and the onset of dementia in Ronald Reagan’s late years in office, when his wife and her astrologist helped him run the country.
So should we not question whether any U.S. president, or any human being, be empowered to order a nuclear attack on another country and kill hundreds of thousands of people, or possibly abolish the human race?
Moreover, I argue that Trump’s tweet about the size of his nuclear button was a good service for our country and the world. It was good because it was a truthful admission by the president (admittedly a rarity for him) that accurately describes the conduct of the United States concerning its nuclear armament. It was also well timed: in the 50th year after the United States signed onto the Treaty on Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).
In sum, the NPT stated in 1968 that the five nuclear countries at the time would work “in good faith” toward “complete disarmament,” while the other nations of the world would never try to obtain nuclear weaponry. But in August of 2017, the Arms Control Association reported that the United States had approximately 1,650 nuclear war-heads deployed on its triad of intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and strategic bombers. Each of these warheads is many times more powerful than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Donald Trump does indeed have a big nuclear button! So let’s credit him for widely disclosing with his tweet that the United States is fully out of compliance with the NPT, and monstrously holds great nuclear superiority over other nations.
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In fact, Trump’s overt nuclear posturing no more threatens the world than the way his immediate predecessor treated nuclear weapons: Barack Obama, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Before leaving office, Obama quietly authorized the modernization of American nuclear weapons and their delivery systems, estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to cost $1.2 trillion from 2017 through 2046.
Now also consider Kim Jong Un, who publicly bragged about every step of progress his nation made in developing nuclear weapons. North Korea originally signed the NPT, but then withdrew from the treaty in 2003. So technically, North Korea, which only recently obtained nuclear weapons, has not violated the NPT any more than other nuclear countries that never signed onto it, including such friends of the U.S. as India and Israel.
Kim Jong Un’s behavior, which appears suicidal and demonic, is quite rational and even justified when looking critically at recent geopolitical events.
According to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to securing the long-term economic future of the United States, our nation spends more on its national defense than the next eight countries combined: China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, United Kingdom, India, France, Japan, and Germany.
In 2003, North Korea watched the U.S. invade Iraq, a country with a far inferior military. The U.S. justified its invasion on false pretenses: that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, even though Iraq declared that it didn’t have them-—and really didn’t.
Kim Jong Un fears that the U.S. seeks a regime change in North Korea, much like it forced upon Iraq. Un also sees thousands of U.S. troops stationed on the other side of his southern border. The lesson learned from Iraq is that North Korea is most secure from invasion and regime change when it is seen as having nuclear weapons, and being willing to use them.
But above all, if the nation with the most powerful military in the world finds it necessary to have nuclear weapons, and continues to improve their effectiveness at great cost, even though for 50 years it has promised to get rid of them, then why isn’t North Korea entitled to its own nuclear weapons?
Nuclear weapons are designed to indiscriminately kill huge numbers of people and demolish the infrastructure of major cities. They are inherently evil. They cannot be used effectively against the real and current threat to our national security: terrorism.
Donald Trump may be unfit for office, but his flexing of America’s nuclear muscle is just symptomatic of our broader national insanity in maintaining nuclear weaponry: a world threat that transcends political party and persists from one presidential administration to another.
And nuclear weaponry is just one of the cancers that ails our country.
We seek security in spending enormous resources to maintain overwhelming military superiority, while our infrastructure crumbles and foreigners readily hack into our information and control systems.
We celebrate a new tax law that favors multinational corporations and the wealthy, while the gap be-tween poor and rich, a decaying middle class, and exploding nation-al debt threaten the sustainability of our consumer-driven economy and burden our children and grand-children.
A man of deeply flawed character and questionable capability uses a sweeping, erroneous portrayal of immigrants as criminals to play on our xenophobia and manipulate us into electing him to our highest office.
I credit President Trump for publicly making another truthful admission, this one on Jan. 26, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzer-land, where he stated: “A nation’s greatness is the sum of its citizens.”
How insightful, Mr. Trump! You may be narcissistic and lack a moral compass, but you’re no madman.
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It isn’t the president that is the measure of a democratic nation’s greatness or its health, but its self-governing people. When those people lose their critical perspective and disregard their civic responsibility—when they allow themselves to be misled by ideology, bigotry, fear, or narrow self-interest-they collectively succumb to a metastasizing and inevitably lethal demise.
Scott Fina
Scott and family are CPF West
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