Something just crossed my mind, regarding the North Korea issue.

Almost everybody expects this to be a storm in a teapot, as usual; DPRK will make lots of noise during South Korean elections, Americans will bribe them with some rice to shut up, and they will proceed to triumphantly report how the vanquished cowardly America paid tribute to the great victorious DPRK. The usual.

However, I have a possible alternative explanation for both Trump’s sudden conciliatory behavior towards the establishment, and this DPRK situation.

Let’s see what happened when Trump got into the White House. First, the Republican party representatives in the parliament told him, in no unclear terms, that they are not going to follow orders, and they are going to vote according to their private interests, essentially they were bought by the highest bidder and now they have to obey his will, regardless of who’s in the White House, and regardless of what he says is national interest. He also tried to implement his policies, and was instantly blackmailed: they’ll simply invent a story about how he works for the Russians, evidence will be invented as in the case of Iraqi WMD, he will be impeached, and they will have a more pliable President to work with. Essentially, he was shown a brief demonstration and told that his methods won’t work. He’ll have to make a genuine compromise. Also, he was shown real facts, not the shit that circulates in the media, and those facts are much more pessimistic than he thought. This means that the methods he intended to use would not work in any case. However, he was also told that the people in charge know more about this shit than he, and that they have plans for American prosperity that have been going on for decades already. They know the true condition of the American economy, and they already have things in motion. This is the obvious reason for his sudden employment of all the supposed enemies; essentially, they explained to him what’s been going on, and he figured out that they are significantly smarter and better informed than he.

I can imagine it going like this: “Look, Mr. President, we know what you want. You want to get the money and manufacturing jobs back to America. You intend to pressure China to make concessions. However, it won’t work, because they have leverage over us that’s at least as powerful as our leverage over them, and we can’t just go there and pressure them. Obama tried, and they responded by launching a SLBM test just off the shore of California, in the direction of the Pacific. Essentially, we told them that we militarily own them, and they responded by demonstrating that they own us at least as much. We had to concede that they have a point. Also, the thing about getting along with the Russians that you had in mind, it won’t work, because we want to have the Russians in total submission, and they want to get rid of our global dominance and compete on equal terms, which we cannot allow because we will lose half of Europe, the entire Middle East, control over oil, control over uranium, and possibly the culture war. So, we cannot offer them anything they will find acceptable, so we might at least have the hostilities on our own terms, accusing them of all kinds of things and diminishing their cultural influence. For all kinds of reasons, from economy to geopolitics, we need a big war. So, instead of trying to pressure the Chinese with methods which were already tried and which failed, why don’t we just cook up something with North Korea, and for real this time, letting them seriously mess up Seoul, and perhaps Japan and the entire region around Vladivostok and Manchuria. Have in mind that South Korea and Japan are formally our allies, but they are a significant part of the reason why our economy is failing. Think Samsung and LG. Basically, the entirety of our industrial competition resides in this very limited geographic region, which is also politically unstable, what with North Korea, Taiwan and the Chinese pretensions. If we cook something up over there, and North Korea is an excellent excuse because they actually are fucking idiots, we won’t be blamed too badly for our part in the unholy mess that will invariably take place. Take a look at our simulations, both short and long term. Short term, the prices of everything manufactured in the region will jump. Long term, South Korea will have to absorb North Korea. China will have a problem with that and possibly intervene militarily. Who knows what will happen with Japan, but they are already on the way out, so it doesn’t matter one way or the other. Essentially, the entire region will be as business-safe as Eastern Ukraine. Then we can implement very simple measures to sweeten the return of big manufacturing businesses over here, and solve your main goal of economic recovery, and the entire East Asia will be so troubled, it won’t be difficult to introduce risk-based sanctions against companies that work there, which would be difficult to justify in the present circumstances. There will be new jobs, our GDP will rise, we will no longer have a trade deficit with everyone and everything electronic will again be made in America. Ignore the Mexicans and similar nonsense, because the real threat to our jobs aren’t the wetbacks, it’s the gooks. So, what do you say, Mr. President?”

I’m not saying it’s true, I’m just playing with ideas.