Asian Angle | Trump vs ‘Rocket Man’: what if North Korea is the problem, not Kim?

The verbal jousting like the one between the ‘frightened dog’ and Pyongyang exposes the dangers of personalising foreign policy

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A ‘Little Rocket Man’ and a ‘Frightened Dog’. Photo: AFP

Published: 10:00am, 30 Sep 2017Updated: 10:00am, 30 Sep 2017

It’s on. Not a nuclear conflict on the Korean Peninsula, thank goodness. But an old-fashioned, trash-talking smackdown between two nuclear-armed adversaries. In the one corner, we have US President Donald Trump, verbal pugilist and reluctant leader of the free world. In the other corner, there’s North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, the 33-year-old heir to the world’s only communist dynasty.

The insults have been flying. Trump has derided Kim as “Little Rocket Man” and a “madman” and he threatened to “destroy North Korea”.

Kim retorted that Trump was “a frightened dog” and a “mentally deranged US dotard” and he vowed to continue building his missile arsenal. Kim’s foreign minister took it a step further, calling Trump’s tweets “an act of war”.

We all know by now that Trump has been the purveyor of the put-down since he first entered the political arena. He rode his name-calling, art-of-the-insult campaign all the way to the White House, dispatching opponents like “Lying Ted” Cruz, “Little Marco” Rubio, and, of course, “Crooked Hillary” Clinton.

Can Trump do anything to stop a war with North Korea?

But while his rhetoric may be more extreme, Trump is actually just following a long line of American presidents who have repeatedly shown a dangerous tendency to personalise foreign policy disputes, resort to childish taunts, and naively assume that countries with long histories and complex cultures can be reduced to the exigencies and eccentricities of their leader of the moment.