An escalating nuclear threat: We rely on diplomacy to avert crises
The escalating crisis provoked by North Korea’s successful goading of US president Trump may not be entirely comparable with the Cuban missile crisis just yet, but any comparison of main players of 1963 and today’s lead actors must reach a chilling conclusion. It is not by any stretch an indulgence in rose-tinted nostalgia to suggest that John F Kennedy and his Soviet counterpart Nikita Khrushchev, both Second World War veterans, seem a Cicero and a Caesar compared to today’s main actors. Kennedy was urbane, educated, charming, self-assured and, even if not faultless, could hardly offer a greater contrast to his blowhard, volatile, wilfully ignorant successor. Khrushchev, who did so much to undo Stalin’s legacy of tyranny, was no saint either but as supreme leaders go he showed, at the critical moment in the second half of the last century, a human heart. Catastrophe was averted. There are no available indications to suggest North Korea’s hereditary dictator Kim Jong-un is capable of such constraint. Rather, the drip-drip of salacious detail from his impoverished country suggest he is at best a paranoid sadist and at worst unhinged. As yet, only one of those charges can be
levelled with any credibility at President Trump.
