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I suppose you're right about the human tendency to embolden during periods of relative peace. WWI was basically the result of everyone getting too cocky during the 100-year Pax Britannica. Still, I would like to push back on two fronts:
- North Korea has been feeling the pressure for a long time. I'm not sure if they consider the last 30 years a period of "relative absence of resistance." Relative to when we were fighting a land war for control of their country? Okay, sure. But we've been sanctioning them, blacklisting them in the international community, arming the South Koreans, and performing military drills on their borders for decades. They seem pretty sketched out by it, to my mind. So while Trump's saber rattling is certainly louder than previous administrations, I don't know if the margin between his actions and those of his predecessors is great enough to really make a difference. North Korea has always known that if they got nukes and used them on a US territory or ally, they'd get blown off the map in retribution. Their goal as rational actors seeking to defend their sovereignty has been to establish something approaching mutually assured destruction, and then use it as a deterrent to keep the outside world from meddling in their bizarre little kingdom. It seems to me that now that they have accomplished this aim, we should accept that we don't really have any military leverage on them. Trump keeps insisting that military options are on the table, but they're all so bad that I doubt anyone in the Kim regime is buying it. All he's doing is needlessly antagonizing them, when the best course of action would be to move to diffuse the situation.
TLDR: not sure the chance of nuclear exchange was really on an upward trend like you suggest. You see a graph going 1-2-4-8-16%, driven by human nature. I see a plot whose natural baseline is 1%, which will only rise when someone like Trump throws fuel on the fire and jacks it up to 2%. Of course I could be wrong, and you could be right.
- Also, I really have very little faith that Trump's rationale is nearly as well thought out as yours. He does not strike me as a very nuanced thinker as far as foreign policy goes. You may argue for human nature and the value of threats as deterrents, but I worry that The Donald is merely interested in out-bullying another man with delusions of grandeur, an authoritarian streak, and weird hair. I hope for all our sakes that this isn't just a phallus-measuring competition for our president, but that seems far more in-character than does an intricate weighing of human tendencies and foreign policy implications. Much like with the Mariners’ demise, I would love love love to be wrong, but I’m pretty confident that I’m not.