North Korea expresed outrage after the U.S. Air force announced the successful launch of an unarmed intercontinental ballistic missile, the Minuteman III, on Wednesday. Photo by Ian Dudley/U.S. Air Force/UPI.
Long long ago, in a strip mall far far away, nerdy teenagers used to hang out in now almost mythical places known as video arcades.
For a quarter, you could zap space invaders, blow up asteroids, or play the part of some Italian plumber named Mario.
I know all this, you see, because I lived it. Yes, I was a first generation gamer, tokens in pocket, hanging out with my fellow freaks and geeks in the backroom of Baker Street Books – yes, believe it or not, the local bookstore had a game room – to see who could get high score on Gorf.
In an age of Xboxs, 60 inch flat panel monitors, and online gaming, I suppose all that sounds pretty quaint. But this was the golden age of the video arcade, and we had a blast.
One of the most popular games from this period was Missile Command. The goal of the player was to protect his cities from being nuked by using anti-ballistic missiles to shoot down the enemy’s incoming ICBMs. If you lost your cities, it was, in classic video game lingo, GAME OVER.
In retrospect, I suppose a game like that, inspired by the Cold War as it was, served to add a bit a levity to what was the deadly serious, ever present threat of nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union.
And speaking of the Cold War, all the headlines about North Korea and nuclear bombs this past week brought back memories of those bad old days when we were regularly treated to newscasts featuring stony faced Leonid Brezhnev, massive eyebrows and all, watching columns of Red Army soldiers, tanks and missiles pass before his reviewing stand in the Kremlin.
Those same headlines also got me to thinking about the foolishness of America’s interventionist foreign policy, and how intervention, once the decision is made to start it, can take on a life of its own.
Truman’s “Police” Action, A Little History
With not declaration of war by Congress as required by the Constitution, President Harry Truman took America to war in Korea under the aegis of the United Nations in June of 1950.
As a way of skirting objections by Constitutionally minded Americans, Truman sold the military action in Korea as a “police action” rather than a war.
That the Constitution neither speaks of “police actions” nor grants presidents the power to engage in them was no hindrance to Truman or to the globalists in the UN.
It may come as a surprise to many today, but nearly sixty-seven years after it began, the Korean War has never officially ended.
Although fighting stopped in July 1953, no peace treaty was ever signed. And since that day, the two sides, North and South Korea, “have remained in a tense state of armed truce” according to historian Charles Armstrong.
Making Intervention Great Again
Although the dawn of America’s imperial age can be traced back to William McKinney’s Spanish American war of 1898, the Korean War represented a significant uptick in American overseas involvement.
Now that Truman had shown that a declaration of war was no longer needed, the political calculus for committing American troops to foreign wars suddenly was much simpler.
The looming threat of communism proved to be a handy tool to getting recalcitrant America-Firsters to knuckle under to America’s new, more aggressive foreign policy stance.
Korea helped make American intervention great again. And it has never looked back.
Intervention Begets Intervention
As anyone with even a passing familiarity with the Old Testament could tell you, King David famously sinned with Bathsheba.
But David’s sin didn’t stop with committing adultery. David tried to manipulate Uriah, Bathsheba’s husband, apparently in an attempt to make him think that he wife was pregnant with his own child. This made David a liar.
When that didn’t work, David plotted with Joab to have Uriah killed in battle, making David a murder.
One of the takeaways from this sordid tale is that it’s hard to commit just one sin. Once you decide to embark on an evil course of action, the whole thing can quickly snowball, whether you want it to or not, into something much larger. One sin, one crime, naturally leads to another, then another, then another.
The same principle applies in foreign policy. When Truman decided to trash the Constitution, and Congress allowed him to get away with it, it should come as no surprise that we find ourselves in the position we’re in today, facing the possibility of Korean War II.
Had Truman never gone to Korea, the events on that peninsula would be of no concern to America.
But because American troops have been there for nearly 70 years, Kim Jong-Un is now perceived by American foreign policy and military leaders as our problem.
Strategic Patience Has Ended
Just last month, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced that “the policy of strategic patience [with North Korea’s nuclear program] has ended.”
Since that time, tensions between North Korea and the US have continued to mount. Earlier this month, Trump stated that if China doesn’t help, the US will “solve the North Korea problem” alone.
Just this week, president Trump invited the entire Senate to a While House briefing on the situation in North Korea.
After what have become daily, and unsuccessful, missile tests by North Korea, the US test fired an ICBM this past Wednesday, inviting anyone who wanted to come and watch.
Perhaps most ominously, drills were held in New York and Washington D.C. this week to test the cities’ response to a nuclear attack.
Searching For Monsters
John Quincy Adams famously summarized America’s original (and Biblical) foreign policy by saying the US goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.
Alas, those days are long gone. As Ron Paul argues in this video clip, North Korea serves as a convenient monster in that part of the world. The North Korean threat helps keeps America’s allies in the region dependent on Washington, which helps maintain US influence in the region and keep China in check.
Paul has even argued that the US has worked to prevent reconciliation between North and South Korea over the years. Maybe by now, the two countries could have reunited as East and West Germany did in the 1990s.
But then that wouldn’t serve the interest of the masters of the universe in Washington, who love their grand game of geopolitical chess.
MYOB, The Bible’s Foreign Policy
In one of his lectures, I don’t have the reference handy, John Robbins brought up the interesting point that the Bible tells Christians to, in so many words, mind their own business. “For we hear that there are some who walk among you in a disorderly manner, not working at all, but are busybodies. Now those who are such we command and exhort through our Lord Jesus Christ that they work in quietness and eat their own bread” (2 Thess. 3:11-12).
This same principle which Paul applied to individuals also applies to governments. Magistrates are to tend to the business of governing their own nations, not spend all their time telling other people how to live and threatening war if they don’t listen.
Just how many wars does the US need? And apparently one isn’t enough. As I write, the US is rattling sabers not just at North Korea, but at Russia, China, Syrian, and Iran.
Trump’s Failure
Outside of Ron and Rand Paul, candidate Donald Trump made some of the best foreign policy statements by a major American political figure in recent history.
President Donald Trump, on the other hand, has fallen in line with the neo-conservatives and the deep state war machine.
This isn’t terribly surprising. But it is disappointing.
What’s remarkable is the speed of Trump’s reversal. Just a few weeks ago he essentially gave up on the long-term US goal of removing Bashar Assad from power in Syria, but reversed himself on a dime in response to an obvious false flag gas attack that was blamed on the Syrian president.
This was then used as a pretext to fire 59 Cruise Missiles into a Syrian and to once again demand Assad’s ouster.
Conclusion
Give War A Chance was the title of a P.J. O’Rourke book from a number of years back. Maybe Trump should rebrand his presidency with it.
At any rate, the Trump administration seems determined to have a war one way or another, somewhere or another, for some reason or another.
Unless the American people finally say enough to this foolishness, there’s not a small chance we could all experience a live action version of Missile Command.
And that would not be fun and games.
Lux Lucet 
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