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The global outlook for American interests is dismal. The country’s best hopes may well lie in the destructive power of its own innovation.

Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel The Castle tells of a palace perched above a Bohemian village. Ineffable emissaries leave and enter in sealed coaches. The townspeople barely glimpse the denizens of the Castle, who govern the town by mysterious means. A telephone connects to the Castle, but the villagers can only speak to whomever might be listening on the other end of the line, without hearing a word of reply. It is interpreted variously as an allegory for the relation of the divine to the human, or as a satire on the Imperial Austrian bureaucracy.

An appropriate ending would be a visit to the Castle, where the inscrutable beings would sit in cavernous offices and complain about their inability to influence events. It would resemble the Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House, where the tyros of the Trump administration are learning how little influence America has in the world after eight years of Barack Obama (not to mention eight years of George W Bush), and how difficult it is to change a game in which America no longer sets the rules.

There is very little the United States can do about the Levant and Mesopotamia, and nothing it can do about the Korean Peninsula – not, in any case, without a long-term effort to change the game.

America is in what chess players call zugzwang in the Middle East: any move it makes loses. The situation in the Korean Peninsula is even more dismal. The North Korean outlaw regime has thousands of artillery tubes aimed at South Korea’s capital, Seoul, just 35 miles from the border, and could destroy the city in an hour of bombardment without resource to its nuclear arsenal. The nuclear weapons are there to threaten Japan and perhaps the US after the outbreak of conventional war. America has some missile defense in the region but none reliable enough to reassure the Japanese that one Korean nuclear weapon couldn’t find its way to Tokyo.

There is no way to confront the Norks in the short term, and President Trump’s “armada” sailing toward or away from the Korean Peninsula has only rhetorical significance. Installing anti-missile systems in South Korea also was an empty gesture. They are inadequate to defend against a Chinese attack, and useless against North Korean artillery. The poison toad of Pyongyang can only be boiled slowly. If the US (and perhaps also Japan) introduced a far more reliable missile defense system that neutralized the North Korean nuclear threat, Pyongyang would fear Washington. For the time being it does not. China can help contain it, but only that.

Much More (10-15 minute Read) http://www.atimes.com/article/america-experiencing-zugzwang-needs-game-changer/

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