Jeff Danziger lives in New York City and Vermont. He is a long time cartoonist for The Rutland Herald and is represented by Counterpoint Syndicate. He is a recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons, a novel and a memoir. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.
Let’s see…since the armistice ending the Korean War, the ruling Kim family has pretty much had to use hostage-taking to convince world leaders to visit their notoriously impoverished and grim country. Fidel Castro was a notable exception, visiting in 1986 to pay his respects to North Korean founder Kim Il Sung. Castro looked around and announced that his politics and North Korea’s were “completely identical on everything.” North Korea couldn’t convince fellow disgusting dictator Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to visit, but in 2013, he sent members of his cabinet to establish diplomatic relations.
In 1994, at the height of tensions over North Korea’s nuclear program, Former President Jimmy Carter traveled to Pyongyang for a private meeting with Kim Il Sung and negotiated a pause in the North Korean nuclear program and the release of an American hostage. Former President Bill Clinton visited in 2009 and met with Kim Il Sung to negotiate the release of imprisoned American journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling. The next year, Jimmy Carter returned to Pyongyang to secure the release of an American educator, Aijalon Mahli Gomes, who had illegally crossed the border from China and was being held by the North Korean regime.
Donald Trump didn’t need a hostage. In 2018 he famously walked twenty steps across the border into North Korea to shake hands with Kim Jong Un on his country’s territory after asking the North Korean leader, “Would you like me to step across?” CNN reported that Kim “appeared overjoyed” in the moment and clapped Trump on the back, saying “I never expected to meet you at this place.” This was after the infamous exchange of “beautiful letters” between the two, which was after Trump denounced Kim as a “cruel dictator” in a speech to legislators in Seoul. Later Trump would tweet, “Why would Kim Jong Un insult me by calling me ‘old,’ when I would NEVER call him ‘short and fat’?”
And now comes Vladimir Putin to visit what has long been called the world’s “hermit nation.” He arrived in Pyongyang by air on TuesdY, greeted warmly at the airport by Kim Jong Un. Today, Putin and Kim signed a strategic mutual defense pact that promises each country will come to the aid of the other against “aggression” by foreign powers. What Putin is really doing, however, is negotiating the release of artillery ammunition and missiles that he needs to use in his war against Ukraine.
Putin and Kim are leaders of pariah nations, unwelcome in capitals around the world by anyone other than fellow pariah leaders. North Korea is one of the few nations where Putin can land the Russian version of Air Force One. In May, Putin visited China and met with Xi Jinping and signed a statement declaring a “new era” of relations between the two nations that would be dedicated to opposition to the United States. Putin is dependent on China’s large purchases of Russian oil and gas since sanctions after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine cut Russia off from trade with the west. Putin would also be welcome in Tehran and Syria, but spinning the globe, it’s harder and harder to find countries that would allow his jet to land on their soil.
Putin visited North Korea once before in 2000, during the early months of his presidency, to establish relations between the two countries and pledge to oppose American military “dominance” around the world.
Putin’s new partnership with Kim would be a hollow one if it weren’t for North Korea’s demonstrated arms production capacity. The country has large reserves of coal and iron ore and for decades demonstrated its willingness to build weapons instead of, for example, producing enough food to feed its people. North Korea probably has the world’s largest stockpile of long-range artillery ammunition in the world, having long ago arrayed thousands of its long-gun howitzers and multiple rocket launchers along the DMZ within range of South Korea’s capital, Seoul. This is in addition to Kim’s more recently produced stockpile of ballistic missiles capable of hitting anywhere in South Korea and even Japan. North Korea is also believed to have a limited number of intercontinental ballistic missiles that could reach the United States and may be nuclear weapons capable.
North Korea is a tiny country, only 45,000 square miles, with a population of 26 million. Its GDP is about $16 billion, with a per capita GDP of $640. It’s almost comical to compare with the U.S. GDP of $26 trillion, which works out to $76,000 per capita. Russia has zillions of square miles and a population of about 144 million. As of 2022, its GDP is $2.24 trillion with a per capita GDP of $15,200. The GDP of the European Union is $19 trillion, with a per capita of $43,000.
But these are just numbers on paper. Even though Russia is no longer considered a great power, we’ve been able to see over the last two-plus years what a country like Russia can do with its limited resources. The Wall Street Journal today sounded the alarm on Russia’s new array of alliances with China, North Korea, and Iran. “The former Soviet Union [once] exported billions of dollars in weapons to the developing world,” the Journal wrote. Today it’s at least in part the other way around as “Moscow scours the globe to sustain its Ukraine war.” Russia’s need for weapons “has expanded into the sharing of sensitive technologies that could threaten the U.S. and its allies long after the Ukraine war ends,” the Journal reported, noting that Iran has helped Russia build a factory to produce armed drones.
The West spent the first years after the fall of the Soviet Union swanning around in the afterglow of the collapse of Communism and entered an era of opening high-end micro-bite expense account restaurants and fouling the upper atmosphere with Gulfstream exhaust. Taking the opportunity to move its resources away from guns, the West indulged its fascination with impossibly expensive weapons systems like the F-35 fighter, which ended up being virtually unusable because in addition to being slow and unwieldy, it was so expensive and filled with ultra-secret systems that we couldn’t risk even one of them being shot down and pillaged for all the high tech junk it carries.
But the end of the Cold war didn’t bring the expected end of hot wars, which rapidly grew in number and intensity. Every martini-sipping expert at the Council on Foreign Relations now agrees that Europe is under threat after Russia’s outrageous invasion of Ukraine and the brutal way it has fought that war. The U.S. and European nations, which have spent trillions on next generation weapons systems and so-called smart bombs, have been left scrambling to jump-start the production of artillery ammunition for 155 mm howitzers, essentially hunks of steel surrounding wads of gunpowder.
The U.S., British and French nuclear capabilities did exactly nothing to deter Russian aggression in Ukraine. Having F-35’s and F-22’s and F-16’s deployed all over Europe wasn’t much of a deterrent, either, and all that weaponry isn’t worth spit if the U.S. and NATO – or the U.S. alone or European nations alone – are not willing to deploy their sophisticated firepower against Russia to defend Ukraine. Here’s the deal about power: it doesn’t exist if it’s sitting still with engines off on concrete runways and in motor pools and armories.
Vladimir Putin knows this and has used his dark knowledge to deadly effect in Ukraine. Now he has formed a partnership with a nation exactly nobody wants to visit or talk to other than him. Michael McFaul, former U.S. ambassador to Russia, tweeted a video of Putin coming down the stairs from his plane with Kim waiting on the red carpet to greet him with the caption, “This is what desperation looks like.” Putin may indeed need to buddy up to his fellow pariah to get his ammo, but their alliance, even if temporary, is a dangerous one.
We should cancel production of new aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines and F-35 jet fighters and start up factories making more big guns and big bullets and tactical missiles. We’re going to need them. It’s dark and getting darker out there in an increasingly hostile and violent world.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.
Of the many mortifying moments of Donald Trump's presidency, few can match his hopeless infatuation with an unlikely partner: North Korean Communist dictator Kim Jong Un. It is still hard to believe that the leader of the free world could stand up in public and tell an audience: "We fell in love. No, really. He wrote me beautiful letters ... We fell in love."
President Joe Biden is meeting Friday with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, and Topic 1, as usual, will be that belligerent nuclear-armed regime in Pyongyang. Biden's approach to North Korea looks and sounds much different from Trump's. But his results are likely to be more or less identical.
Trump thought he was much shrewder than his predecessors in defusing this nuclear threat. "Clinton failed, Bush failed, and Obama failed," he tweeted in 2017. "I won't fail." First, he warned that if the North Koreans threatened the United States, "they will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen." He tweeted, "I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his."
Then, as often happens in romantic tales, two people who start out disliking each other soon went head over heels. In 2018, Kim invited Trump to meet with him, and Trump surprised everyone by accepting. After the first meeting ever between a U.S. president and a North Korean head of state, Trump exulted. "There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea," which was a charming fantasy.
The two leaders met twice more, amid similarly extravagant claims. Trump's supposed goal was "the complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula." But by the time he left office, it was obvious that he had naively granted North Korea more time to do what it had been doing all along: building up its nuclear and missile capacities.
Kim's father, Kim Jong Il, had carried out two nuclear tests and 16 missile tests. The son ramped up, conducting four nuclear tests and 91 ballistic missile tests. Experts say North Korea has as many as 60 nuclear weapons and produces enough fissile material to add another dozen each year. Nothing Trump did impeded its progress.
Biden has his own strategy. One official told The Washington Post the administration will pursue a "careful, modulated diplomatic approach, prepared to offer relief for particular steps" with an "ultimate goal of denuclearization." But agreeable adjectives won't dissuade the North Koreans from proceeding with something they believe is vital to their survival.
They believe this because it's true. In 2018, Vice President Mike Pence warned that North Korea "will only end like the Libyan model ended if Kim Jong Un doesn't make a deal." The "Libyan model," you may recall, involved the U.S. and its allies using military force to topple the regime of Moammar Gadhafi, whose gruesome fate was to be captured and killed by rebels.
But Pence chose exactly the wrong analogy. Gadhafi was vulnerable because he had earlier agreed to give up his nuclear weapons program. Had he managed to assemble an atomic arsenal, the U.S. would not have tried to evict him from power. From Libya, Kim can deduce the potential downside of surrendering his nuclear weapons.
It may not be impossible for the U.S. to reach an agreement with North Korea to freeze or reduce the size of its arsenal in exchange for sanctions relief and full diplomatic relations. But even that limited task will be harder for Biden because of Trump's self-defeating policy toward another adversary — Iran.
President Barack Obama had joined with several other major nations in negotiating an agreement in which Iran agreed to give up 98% of its stockpile of uranium, dismantle thousands of centrifuges and accept stringent international inspections — all of which would prevent it from building nuclear weapons. In exchange, the U.S. and its partners consented to lift economic sanctions on Tehran.
But Trump stupidly withdrew from the accord, proving that the U.S. can't be trusted to honor its commitments. Why would Kim reduce or surrender his nuclear deterrent to get an agreement that might end up in a White House shredder? Why would he risk being naked to his enemies, as Gadhafi was?
The specter of a North Korea armed with nuclear weapons and long-range missiles has bedeviled one American president after another. Biden, the latest to confront it, won't be the last.
Steve Chapman blogs at http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chapman. Follow him on Twitter @SteveChapman13 or at https://www.facebook.com/stevechapman13. To find out more about Steve Chapman and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
Reprinted with permission from TomDispatch
It was August 2017 and Donald Trump had not yet warmed up to Kim Jong-un, North Korea's portly dictator. In fact, in typical Trumpian fashion, he was pissed at the Korean leader and, no less typically, he lashed out verbally, threatening that country with a literal hell on Earth. As he put it, "They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen." And then, just to make his point more personally, he complained about Kim himself, "He has been very threatening beyond a normal state."
Only a year and a half later, our asteroidal president would, of course, say of that same man, "We fell in love." Still, that threat by an American leader to -- it was obvious -- launch a nuclear strike for the first time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nearly obliterated in August 1945 was memorable. The phrase would, in fact, become the title of a 2018 bestselling book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, by journalist Michael Wolff. Two years later, amid so many other threatening phrases from this president, "fire and fury" has, however, been left in history's dustbin, largely forgotten by the world.
"This Is Not an Act of God"
Too bad, since it seems so much more relevant now that California, Oregon, and Washington, not to speak of a Southwest already officially in a "megadrought," have experienced the sort of apocalyptic fire and fury (and heat and smoke) that has turned daytime skies an eerie nighttime orange (or yellow or even purple, claims a friend of mine living in the San Francisco Bay Area). We're talking about a fire and fury that's forced cars to put on their headlights at noon; destroyed towns (leaving only armed right-wing militants behind amid the flames to await imagined Antifa looters); burned millions of acres of land, putting hundreds of thousands of Americans under evacuation orders; turned startling numbers of citizens into refugees under pandemic conditions; and crept toward suburbs and cities, imperiling the world as we've known it.
In the wake of the hottest summer on record in the Northern Hemisphere, we are, in other words, talking about the sort of apocalyptic conditions that the president undoubtedly had in mind for North Korea back in 2017, but not even faintly for the U. S. of A; we're talking, that is, about a burning season the likes of which no one in the West has ever seen before, a torching linked to the overheating of this planet thanks to the release of fossil-fuel-produced greenhouse gasses in ever greater quantities. In fact, as Washington Governor Jay Inslee pointed out recently, we shouldn't even be talking about "wildfires" anymore, but about "climate fires" whose intensity has already outpaced by years the predictions of most climate scientists. (Or, as Inslee put it, "This is not an act of God. This has happened because we have changed the climate of the state of Washington in dramatic ways.")
Significant hunks of the American West have now been transformed into the natural equivalent of furnaces, with fires even reaching the suburban edges of Portland, Oregon (which, for days, had the worst air quality of any major urban area on the planet), and promising a future in which cities will undoubtedly be swept up in such conflagrations, too. Admittedly, Donald Trump didn't threaten to launch "fire and fury like the world has never seen" against Portland (though he did send federal agents there to snatch peaceful protesters off its streets and continues to insult and threatenthat city's mayor). If anything, as the fires scorched those states to a crisp, he did his best to avoid the subject of the burning West, as in these years more generally he's largely treated climate change (that "hoax") like... well, a pandemic that should be ignored while America stayed "open."
And it's not a subject he's been grilled on much either, not until recently when Western governors began laying into him over his stance on climate change. To offer just one example, as far as I can tell, Bob Woodward, the Washington Post editor and court chronicler of presidents who, for months, had unparalleled access to Trump and grilled him on so many subjects, never bothered to ask him about the most important, most dystopian, most apocalyptic future Americans face. And mainstream Democrats didn't do much better on the subject while those fires were building to a crescendo until Joe Biden finally called the president a "climate arsonist." He added, aptly enough, "If you give a climate arsonist four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised if we have more of America ablaze?"
There's no question that, at the beck and call of the fossil-fuel industry, Donald Trump and his demonic crew have worked without qualms or remorse to ensure that this would be a fiery and furious America. Freeing that industry of restrictions of every sort, withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, opening up yet more areas for oil drilling, wiping out environmental safeguards, and even (at the very moment when the West was burning) appointing a climate-science denier to a top position at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the president and his crew proved themselves to be pyromaniacs of the first order.
Of course, the heating of this planet has been intensifying for decades now. (Don't forget, for instance, that Barack Obama presided over a U.S. fracking boom that left people referring to us as "Saudi America.") Still, this president and his top officials have put remarkable energy (so to speak) into releasing yet more carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. And here's the strange thing: they made it deep into the present apocalyptic moment in the West without -- Greta Thunberg and climate change protesters aside -- being held faintly accountable for their urge to fuel the greatest danger humanity faces other than nuclear weapons. In fact, as is increasingly obvious from the torching of the West, what we're beginning to experience is a slow-motion version of the nuclear apocalypse that Trump once threatened to loose on North Korea.
In an all-too-literal fashion, The Donald is indeed proving to be history's "fire and fury" president.
And don't for a moment think that there was no warning about the over-the-top burning now underway in this country. After all, in 2019, parts of Australia were singed to a crisp in a way never before seen, killing at least 25 humans and possibly more than a billion animals. And that country, too, was headed by a climate-change denier, a man who once brought a piece of coal to parliament and handed it around while soothingly telling other legislators, "Don't be afraid, don't be scared." In addition, in recent years, the Arctic (of all places) has been smoking and burning in an unprecedented fashion, heating its permafrost and releasingstaggering amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Oh, and this June, the temperature in a small town in Siberia crossed the 100-degree mark for the first time.
By the way, Russia, too, is run by a leader who until recently was a climate denier. I mean, what is it about the urge of so many of us in such a crisis to support those dedicated to quite literally destroying this planet as a livable place for... well, us? (Hey there, Jair Bolsonaro!)
Our Very Own Firenado
An almost unimaginable near-half-century ago on a different planet, I lived in San Francisco. I can still remember the fog rolling in daily, even during summer in one of the coolest, breeziest cities around. Not this year, though. On September 6th, for instance, the temperature there broke 100 degrees, "crushing" the previous record for that day. In Berkeley, across the Bay, where I also once lived long, long ago, it hit 110. As a heat wave swept the state (and the West), temperatures near Los Angeles soared to a record-breaking 121 degrees (almost challenging overheated Baghdad, Iraq, this year), while reaching 130 degrees in the aptly named Death Valley -- and that's just to start down a list of soaring temperatures across the West from the Canadian to the Mexican borders.
As those fires filled the skies with smoke and ash, turning day into the eeriest of nights, a smoke cloud the likes of which had never before been seen appeared over the coastal West. Meanwhile, firenadoes were spotted and the ash-filled air threatened terrible things for health. As has been true for the last 46 years, I'm thousands of miles away from my old Bay Area haunts. Still, I regularly check in with friends and TomDispatch authors on that coast, some aged like me and locked in their homes lest the smoke and ash, the air from hell, do them in. Meanwhile, their cars are packed to go, their evacuation checklists ready.
My heart goes out to them and, really, to all of us (and, above all, to those to whom we oldsters will be leaving such a blazing, tumultuous world).
Sadly, among the endless scandals and horrors of the Trump era, the greatest one by far scandalized all too few for all too long among those who officially matter on this beleaguered planet of ours. Even in 2016, it should have been obvious enough that a vote for Donald Trump was a vote for the apocalypse. Give him credit, though. He made no secret of that fact or that his presidency would be a fossil-fueled nightmare. It was obvious even then that he, not climate change, was the "hoax" and that this planet would suffer in unique ways from his (ad)ministrations.
And in every way imaginable, Donald Trump delivered as promised. He's been uniquely fiery and furious. In his own fashion, he's also been a man of his word. He's already brought "fire and fury" to this country in so many ways and, if he has anything to say about it, he's just gotten started.
Don't doubt for a second that, should he be losing on November 3rd (or beyond, given the mail-in vote to come), he'll declare electoral fraud and balk at leaving the White House. Don't doubt for a second that he'd be happy to torch that very building and whatever, at this point, is left of the American system with it before he saw himself "lose."
Since he is, in his own fashion, a parody of everything: a politician, a Republican, an autocrat, even a human being, he sums up in some extreme (if eerily satiric) fashion human efforts to destroy our way of life in these years. In truth, fiery and furiously fueled, he's a historic cloud of smoke and ash over us all.
By his very nature, to use those 2017 nuclear words of his, he is "threatening beyond a normal state." Think of him as the president from hell and here I mean a literal hell. Four more years of him, his crew, and the fossil-fuelized criminals running the major oil, gas, and coal companies who are riding his coattails into profit heaven and planetary misery are the cast of a play, both comedy and tragedy, that none of us should have to sit through. He's our very own firenado and -- it's not complicated -- four more years of him will consign us to a hell on Earth of a sort still only faintly imaginable today.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs TomDispatchand is a fellow of the Type Media Center. His sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.
Copyright 2020 Tom Engelhardt
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