TWO vain, prickly, strutting loudmouths hurl colourful threats at each other. Were they hip-hop artists engaged in a rap battle, it might be entertaining. But since they both have nuclear weapons, it is not. At the UN General Assembly on September 19th President Donald Trump threatened to “totally destroy North Korea”, a country of 25m, along with “Rocket Man”—its leader, Kim Jong Un. Mr Kim retorted that he would “surely and definitely tame the mentally deranged US dotard with fire”. Meanwhile, the North Korean foreign minister raised the prospect of testing a thermonuclear bomb over the Pacific, and American strategic bombers made a show of force off North Korea’s east coast. North Korea declared that tantamount to a declaration of war, and said that next time it might shoot them down.
For Americans it is as if a half-vanquished enemy is “rising zombielike from the crypt of...dimly remembered wars”, as Blaine Harden, a veteran writer on North Korea, puts it. Unlike the Vietnam war, which is perennially relived and relitigated, the Korean war of 1950-53 is largely forgotten in America. Yet it brought about the utter devastation of the Korean peninsula, along with the deaths of 2.5m civilians and 1.2m soldiers, among them 34,000 Americans. After a massive Chinese intervention, it ended with Korea as divided as it had been before.
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