USAF
Last week, US Air Force B-1B Lancer bombers flew with F-35B fighter jets over the North Korea coast. It is the farthest north of the country’s Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) that any US military plane has flown over in the 21st century. The Pentagon has referred to the mission as sending a “clear message”.
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. Appendage
JOHANN OLAV KOSS
HAVE you heard of Johann Olav Koss? You may well have done, for as an Olympic skater he has broken eleven world records and holds four gold medals. However, it’s for something that was almost a mistake, of which he is perhaps most proud. Let me explain.
As a young ambassador for Olympic Aid visiting the starving population of Eritrea, he impulsively arranged for the youngsters of Norway to send thousands of soccer balls to their peers in Africa.
It wasn’t until the balls actually arrived that he realised a population desperately short of food might be less than impressed by a donation of sports equipment.
But President Isais Afewerki was able to reassure him. “This is the most beautiful gift we have ever received,” he said. “Finally, we are being seen as human beings. We are more than mouths to feed. We are people – we, too, have dreams and we hope for a better future.”
Today Johann Olav Koss is honorary chairman of Right To Play, a charity dedicated to providing, via sports, a pathway to all kinds of health and educational projects. Isn’t it good to think that a soccer ball can score such a world-changing goal?
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DONALD TRUMP
MANY will sense an unmissable irony in President Trump’s address at the United Nations, set-up after the Second World War to promote global peace and co-operation. Mr Trump issued the bluntest of threats to “totally destroy” North Korea.
The only moot point is whether the leader of the free world intends to achieve that objective with a military invasion and conventional weapons, or by means of a nuclear strike.
These are certainly deeply worrying times. A forum meant for dialogue and cultural understanding, has been used by Mr Trump in the delivery of the most incendiary message a world leader could have mustered.
Mr Trump, of course, is no admirer of the UN, and has been constantly dismissive of the global body since coming to presidential office. Up until now, that criticism has been accepted as the usual bluster we have become accustomed to.
This week, however, his rhetoric moved to a new level. In vowing to obliterate North Korea, the American President is deliberately provoking Kim Jong-un, and by resorting to the playground tactic of name-calling with his reference to “Rocket Man”, many observers will wonder if he is laughing at the North Korean leader.
This sort of approach by Mr Trump has worked well for him in the New York real estate market, where the winner takes all, and risks can be handsomely rewarded. It now looks as if he believes that a similar sort of approach can produce the same sort of results in war games, when the reality is that there would no winners. A strike on North Korea would almost certainly prompt counter-attacks on every territory within range of Kim Jong-un’s armoury – South Korea, China, Japan, Russia – and that is before account is taken of the secondary effects of fall-out from a nuclear explosion.
The danger in all of this is that Trump’s baiting of the North Korean leader could be enough to spark warfare. If we are unsure of what Trump’s actual strategy is, we have no idea what his counterpart is thinking right now, or how close to the edge he might already be. Kim is clearly irrational and unstable.
The other great irony from Mr Trump’s war-mongering address is that he is looking for backers to endorse his positioning. But a glance around the room would have seen only despair from the assembled delegates.
Mr Trump’s only known way of dealing with conflict is to goad, and growl threats which put every one of us at risk. There must be a better way.
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