Commentary: “The Trump era has given me this persistent feeling of unreality,” wrote journalist Ezra Klein on Twitter earlier this month. “I am watching this, and reporting on it, and covering it, and there’s a part of me that still can’t believe it’s happening, that these tweets are real, that this man is actually the president.”
How does such a prominent journalist remain so innocent?
Klein was apparently reacting to President Donald Trump’s statement regarding North Korea’s arrival as a nuclear power, when Trump boasted that “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one.”
A major theme of the Trump resistance among liberals and conservatives alike is that under Trump we are in some new danger of nuclear war. Ladies and gentlemen, these fulminations are hilarious. Of course we are in danger of nuclear war. The danger of nuclear war has been a feature (not a bug) of our security policy for half a century. We currently have 1,800 warheads deployed, ready to launch in minutes, with 4,000 stockpiled. Eight other countries are known or believed to possess nuclear arsenals. The danger of nuclear war has been present every day that I have lived on this earth, and preceded my birth.
Belief in the deterrent value of nuclear weapons is based on the calculation that we have an arsenal big enough to survive an initial attack and strike back with overwhelming force. The deterrent value is produced by other states believing our “button” is bigger and that attacking us will assure their annihilation.
When the Soviet Union achieved nuclear parity (i.e. a “button” as big as ours), the logic of “mutual assured destruction” was introduced as a rational strategy. It depended on other parties being rational enough not to desire the destruction of all human life – a plausible outcome of a nuclear winter.
Americans like their presidents and cabinet officials to sound sober, scientific, and statesmanlike. Trump’s departure from that rhetorical style in favor of straight talk about American dominance is something many of his supporters found refreshing.
Others prefer a rhetoric that presents America as high-minded and beneficent, conceiving ourselves as a noble giant advancing classical liberalism around the world and championing freedom everywhere. It is the hero costume of American exceptionalism. It has long obscured imperial policies, which we will address next week.
We have had the nuclear sword of Damocles swaying over our heads for generations. The planet has had more than one close call, narrowly averting nuclear war with consequences that would devastate human life across the earth. Yet the majority accepts this state of affairs and largely ignores it. Whatever Trump’s own sins might be, he did not build this apparatus.
There are legitimate grounds for wondering about this president’s judgment, but the question we have been deferring for generations is whether any human being should ever be entrusted with the power to destroy life on earth, whether any application of that capacity is truly sane.
Americans tend to be persuaded by rhetoric and appeals to emotion rather than awareness and analysis of what our leaders do in our name. When it comes to the nuclear arms race and the balance of apocalyptic power, we have been putting up with a precarious and insane notion of national security longer than most of us have been alive.
In this sense, Trump’s strangeness is merely stripping a veil from a disturbing truth.
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Algernon D’Ammassa is Desert Sage. This article was revised by the author for KRWG from a column that ran previously in the Deming Headlight and Las Cruces Sun News. Share your thoughts at adammassa@demingheadlight.com.