I’m scared. I’ll admit it.
I don’t think anything is about to happen, and I have reasons for that. South Korea is going about its business as if everything is normal, because what the hell else can we do? But it’s unnerving to have talk of fire and fury directed at the place you live. I’ve started thinking about what I’d do if I had to leave.
Setting aside the rhetoric, though, it doesn’t appear that either the United States or North Korea is preparing for an actual war. The US has sent some planes our way, but that’s about it. No carrier group, no calling up of reservists like before the Gulf War and the Iraq War, no massive movement of troops or materiel. Soldiers in Korea and Guam are still in their barracks. (For what it’s worth, moving any great number of troops into South Korea would require at least the tacit approval of the government here, which has a pretty serious stake in not getting its country destroyed.)
On the North Korean side, I haven’t seen any reports of big troop movements: no tanks massing by the DMZ, no large-scale mustering, no panic in Pyongyang.
The biggest sign to look for — and there’s no hint of it — is a move to begin evacuating American citizens. There are well over a hundred thousand of us here, including diplomats and their families, and the US is likely to want to move us out of the way before doing anything big. So for the moment, at least, nothing big seems to be planned.
But it’s the small and unplanned that scares me. A planned large-scale war is something Trump’s generals are very unlikely to encourage, but I worry that our president might order a missile strike on impulse, without waiting for our military to be ready for North Korea’s response. What that response would be, we can’t know. It could be anything from total silence to a strike at Guam to a massive bombardment of Seoul.
I don’t think any of this is likely, mind you. But it’s not pleasant to consider the odds, or to keep hoping that something serious happens somewhere else in the world to distract the president. I hope this passes soon, and we can all move on with our lives.
Also published on Medium.