Trump threatens “fire and fury” against North Korea

By Peter Symonds, Senior Editorialist, wsws.org

US President Donald Trump yesterday issued a bloodcurdling threat against North Korea, dramatically heightening the danger of a war on the Korean Peninsula that could rapidly engulf the region and the world. “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States,” he warned. “They will be met with fire, fury and, frankly, power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.”

Trump in his habitual mode: ignorantly shooting off his mouth and cancelling whatever good he might accidentally do.

Trump’s comments can only inflame a situation of acute tensions following the test launching of two long-range North Korean missiles last month and the imposition of punitive UN Security Council sanctions that threaten to cripple North Korea’s economy. For Trump to threaten to reduce the small impoverished country to ashes is the height of recklessness.

Trump has deliberately undermined the efforts of US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson over the past week to lay the basis for negotiations by reassuring North Korea that the US is not seeking regime-change or a pretext for launching a military assault. The unstable, crisis-ridden regime in Pyongyang can only assume that it faces an imminent and massive attack by the United States. It is responding with its own bellicose rhetoric.

In a statement yesterday, North Korea declared it was “examining the operational plan” to strike US bases on Guam with medium- to long-range ballistic missiles. Such threats play directly into the hands of the Trump administration by providing the excuse for the US to carry out pre-emptive strikes against North Korea.

Not since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 has the world stood so close to the brink of nuclear war. An incident or accident, whether minor or major, could trigger a conflict that rapidly draws in other nuclear-armed powers, such as China and Russia, with incalculable consequences.

Unlike 1962, when US President John Kennedy sought to defuse the crisis and overruled the demands of his fascistic Air Force chief of staff, General Curtis LeMay, to bomb Russian missile sites in Cuba, Trump is intentionally escalating the North Korean crisis. His threats are unprecedented for a US president. One is compelled to go back to the fascistic rants of Hitler to find any parallel.

No one should dismiss Trump’s statements as empty rhetoric. By threatening North Korea with annihilation if it carries out further tests, Trump has created a situation where it is impossible for him to back down. Moreover, such is the intense crisis and infighting in American ruling circles that Trump may be driven to launch a reckless attack on North Korea as a means of diverting attention from the political turmoil at home.

The Trump administration, assisted by a servile media, is already ramping up a propaganda campaign aimed at stampeding American public opinion into believing that US cities are in imminent danger of a nuclear attack from North Korea.

SIDEBAR
BELOW: The absolute prince of scumbags, Lindsey Graham, senator for the traditionally reactionary state of South Carolina, who along with his equally repugnant twin, John McCain, never ceases to push humanity to the abyss of total destruction, explains "the situation" to media courtier Charlie Rose and company. The media prostitutes are there to help him. The senator was happy to guarantee his interlocutors that "all the dying will be done over there, not here, by Americans."  You can't get any more repugnant than that in terms of imperialist jingoism, or outright fascism, but no one batted an eyelash or raised an objection. The senator is supposed to be a pious Christian, by the way. What do you call a nation that permits and honors vermin like these in its highest councils?

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Washington Post yesterday featured an article entitled, “North Korea is fast approaching Trump’s red line.” The article uncritically reported claims made in “a previously secret Defence Intelligence Agency analysis” that Pyongyang had produced “a miniaturised warhead that can fit inside one of the intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) that it has been testing.”

These claims come from the same American intelligence establishment that forged the lies about weapons of mass destruction used to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq. They cannot be taken at face value. Everything about North Korea’s so-called ICBMs remains in question, including their range, accuracy, warhead load and ability to survive re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere.

Trump is utterly indifferent to the immense loss of life that would result from a war with North Korea. Even if the conflict were limited to the Korean Peninsula, the number of deaths would run into the millions. According to one estimate, the population of the South Korean capital Seoul alone would suffer a million casualties in the first hours of the fighting.

Speaking on the NBC “Today” program last week, right-wing Republican Senator Lindsey Graham gave a chilling insight into Trump’s thinking. “If there’s going to be a war to stop [Kim Jong-un], it will be over there,” Graham said. “If thousands die, they’re going to die over there. They are not going to die over here—and he’s told me that to my face.”

Graham declared that war was “inevitable” unless North Korea halted its missile tests—in other words, completely capitulated to US demands. “There will be a war with North Korea over their missile program if they continue to try to hit America with an ICBM. [Trump] has told me that and I believe him.”

The acute danger of war in Asia is not simply the product of the fascistic individual Trump, but expresses the profound and insoluble crisis of global and American capitalism. US administrations—Republican and Democratic alike—have resorted to military aggression in a desperate bid to reverse the protracted decline of American capitalism and establish its global dominance.

A succession of wars in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia is now coalescing into a direct confrontation between the world’s major economic powers. The Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia” involved an enormous military buildup throughout the Indo-Pacific in preparation for war against China—the central target of US threats against North Korea.

In Europe, the US is involved in one military exercise after another as it prepares for a military confrontation with Russia, which is engaged in its own extensive [defensive!] war games. In the Middle East, the US and Russia are militarily involved on opposing sides of the Syrian conflict. Any one of these flashpoints could become the trigger for war between nuclear-armed powers that would kill millions, if not billions, of people and destroy civilisation as we know it.

This extraordinarily tense situation is extremely serious. Workers around the world cannot afford to wake up in the morning to find that the US has launched massive attacks on North Korean military installations and industry, that Pyongyang has retaliated by hitting Seoul and Tokyo, and that China, Russia and the other major powers are issuing their own threats and putting their nuclear arsenals on high alert.

The urgent task facing the working class is the building of an international anti-war movement based on a socialist program to put an end to capitalism, the root cause of war.

BONUS FEATURE

Polls show plunging popular support for Trump

By Patrick Martin, wsws.org
Dateline: 9 August 2017

A spate of public opinion polls released over the past week shows growing popular hostility towards the Trump administration, particularly in those layers of the population and those regions where his right-wing populist campaign won support during the 2016 election campaign.

The recent polls span a wide range of the official political and media spectrum, including Gallup, several television networks, and polling organizations closely aligned with either the Democratic or Republican Party. All report the same trend: a sharp drop in support for Trump, mainly among lower-income white voters. (Trump’s support among minority voters, which was already very low, has declined less dramatically).

Approval of Trump’s performance as president fell to new lows in virtually every poll: 32 percent according to Investor’s Business Daily, 33 percent according to Quinnipiac University, 36 percent in the CBS survey, 37 percent recorded by both the Gallup daily tracking poll and Reuters/IPSOS, and 38 percent according to CNN.

All of these figures are record lows for an American president during his first year in office. Normally it requires a major war, financial collapse, social disaster or scandal to generate such a level of popular disapproval and distrust.

Even the notoriously pro-Republican Rasmussen poll has Trump at 41 percent, compared to a disapproval rate of 57 percent. The same poll shows 26 percent strong approval compared to 49 percent strong disapproval, a 23-point deficit compared to a deficit of zero reported by Rasmussen in February.

Many of the surveys give a more detailed demographic breakdown, as well as state and regional figures, and seek to identify the political issues driving the growing popular hostility to the Trump administration.

Quinnipiac found that among white voters without a college degree, the demographic in which Trump posted his largest electoral margin, approval of Trump’s job performance fell from 53 percent in June to only 40 percent.

Investor’s Business Daily noted that Trump “lost significant support across the board, but saw big declines among areas of core support, including Republicans, Midwesterners, middle-income families, white men and the high-school educated.” This included a 12-point drop among Republicans.

Among income groups, Trump suffered the biggest losses among those with household incomes between $30,000 and $50,000, dropping from 40 percent in early July to 27 percent in early August.

On a state-by-state basis, the Gallup Organization reported, based on interviews with a massive pool of 81,155 adults over the past six months, that Trump’s approval rating has fallen below 50 percent in 33 of the 50 states, including 14 states whose electoral votes Trump won last November. The drop in support for Trump was especially pronounced both in northern industrial states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, and in the southwestern states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada.

The polls found that health care and immigration were among the most important issues fueling hostility towards the Trump administration. CNN found 62 percent disapproval of Trump on health care, 55 percent disapproval on immigration, 61 percent on foreign policy and 54 percent on “helping the middle class.” CBS found 59 percent disapproval on health care, 57 percent disapproval on immigration, and 61 percent disapproval of Trump’s policy towards North Korea.

The Quinnipiac poll highlighted mass opposition to the Trump administration’s efforts to encourage discrimination against gays, lesbians and transgendered people. By 68-27 percent, those polled opposed Trump’s proposal to ban transgendered people from the military (including 55-39 percent opposition among military families). By an 89-8 percent margin those polled said it should be illegal for an employer to discriminate against a worker based on sexual orientation, although the Trump Justice Department has gone into court recently to argue the opposite.

While these polls show massive popular opposition to the Trump administration and its policies, this does not translate into support for the Democratic Party, which has sought to attack the administration from the right by casting Trump as a stooge of Russia and demanding a more aggressive anti-Russian military-diplomatic posture.

The Republican Party had a net negative rating of 42 percent—22 percent favorable, 64 percent unfavorable—an all-time low. But the Democratic Party was also viewed negatively, albeit by a smaller margin, 36 percent favorable versus 48 percent unfavorable.

Similarly, congressional Republicans had a disapproval rate of 80-15 percent for their policies on health care, according to Quinnipiac, and Democrats had a disapproval rate of 59-34 percent on the same issue. Those polled favored a single-payer system in health care, “Medicare for all,” by a margin of 51-38 percent.

The crumbling popular support for Trump has thrown both capitalist parties into crisis, the Democrats no less than the Republicans, and perhaps even more so. Nothing terrifies the Democrats more than the prospect of a mass movement from below directed against the right-wing policies of the Trump administration, because it would threaten the capitalist system as a whole.

This fear of the working class, as much as a desire to curry favor with the military-intelligence apparatus, accounts for the maniacal insistence of the Democrats that the sole issue of any importance in American politics is the alleged Russian intervention in the 2016 presidential election.

This issue was pioneered during the election campaign itself by Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential candidate, who sought to overcome her own deep unpopularity, because of her close identification with Wall Street and war, by painting Trump as the favored candidate of Moscow. That appeal failed in the election and the current even more intense anti-Russian campaign is still failing to resonate among working people.

On domestic policies, the Democrats are eager to seek a compromise with Trump, no matter how right-wing the policies advanced by the administration and its congressional Republican allies. The collapse of the Republican efforts to combine repeal of Obamacare with the dismantling of Medicaid as a social benefit has been followed by repeated Democratic offers to work on a bipartisan basis to make changes in Obamacare to safeguard the profits of the insurance companies.

An even more sinister bipartisan effort is under way in relation to Trump’s proposal for sweeping tax cuts for the wealthy and corporate America. The White House has begun meeting with a group of “centrist”—i.e., right-wing—Democrats to combine tax “reform” with increased infrastructure spending.

The New York Times began the media campaign on behalf of such a tax-cutting deal with an editorial Tuesday, “What Real Tax Reform Could Be,” which hailed what it called the “rare bipartisan consensus that closing loopholes in order to lower the top corporate rate of 35 percent would help American businesses compete globally.”

The newspaper endorsed the number one goal of corporate CEOs—allowing corporations to repatriate profits kept abroad to avoid taxation, without paying the full tax due. It declared, “Democrats should give up their opposition to granting corporations a discounted tax rate for the profits they bring home.”

The Times also called for imposition of a carbon tax, which, under the versions proposed by Democrats, would operate as a consumption tax, falling most heavily on working-class families who spend much more of their income on gasoline and home heating oil than the wealthy, as well as a Value Added Tax, an even more regressive measure that would serve as a national sales tax.