{For the easily confused: Not a picture of North Korea}
One person disagreed, and the basis of their perspective surprised me:
I'll admit that I don't understand how context (of placement?) applies to style in the sense that the original poster meant it, and of course, grammatically, a threat is just a particular kind of promise. Those points aside, though, I think what they were trying to get at is the importance a threat's credibility - how much we believe someone will follow through on a threat is important.
In particular, their idea seems to be that the current leader of North Korea wouldn't dare attack the United States, because his brother went to school here. In other words, Kim Jong-Un's threats are not credible, because an attack on the U.S. would risk harming his brother's college friends. Granted, Kim's relationship with his brother's former roommate would be slightly closer than his relation to his father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate, but staying his hand in this case would be a surprising degree of compassion from a man who executed his father's brother's entire family.
While the poster seems to think Kim Jong-Un wouldn't dare strike a U.S. target for fear of hitting one of his brother's ex-girlfriends, he seems to believe that, because Trump does not have any social connection to people living in the DPRK, he is much more likely to make good on his threat to violently attack North Korea if they continue to make threats. Given Trump is basically a walking 'I'll sue them!' factory, who follows through on his threats maybe 10% of the time, I'm surprised anyone would take his threats seriously, but evidently this person does.
But this is writer's blog, so let's just consider the quality of the threat based on its own content, rather than upon the character of the person issuing it, or upon their relative's educational backgrounds.
I'm not a martial artist, and most of the fights I've run into I have averted without physical conflict, so clearly I don't have the same expertise this person does. I'm not just a writer, though; I have an academic background in history and social psychology. From that point of view, I'd say the difference between a good threat and a bad threat is one of credibility.
In so far as a threat is a promise, it has two parts: (1) what you are promising to do, and (2) under what conditions you're promising to do it. To be believable, both of these need to be specific:
Good threat: "If you throw food on the floor one more time, you're going to bed without dessert."
Bad threat: "If you keep misbehaving, you're going to be in trouble."
The criteria for the threat to be fulfilled need to be clear, so the target of the threat knows where the line is and at what point they are crossing it. Otherwise, they will keep pushing the line incrementally to see how much they can get away with.
The nature of the promised response needs to be clear, as well, so that the consequences of non-compliance are tangible, and those consequences don't just need to be tangible, they need to be plausible. You can't threaten to do something you would be unwilling or unable to do. As irritating as it may be to drive 900 miles with your toddler kicking the back of your seat, you aren't going to "turn this car around" and cancel the vacation you've planned for three months.
If you're smart, you won't threaten them at all; you'll buy them cake, take them to a playground for twenty minutes, and resume driving after they've passed out.
Threatening adults isn't really different from threatening children. Granted, you have to shift the scale of the threat a bit - it would be wonderful if Kim Jong-Un could swayed by threatening to withhold Mara-La-Go's now world famous "beautiful" chocolate cake, but as an adult dictator, the DPRK's Supreme Leader is capable of getting his own cake; for all we know, he's installed a button on his desk to summon his favorite sugary treat on demand - that's the sort of weird-ass thing dictator's do, right?
While the scale of the threat needs to be raised, the same underlying principles remain; the threat must be clear and believable. So how does Trump's threat measure up?
"North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen... he has been very threatening beyond a normal state. They will be met with fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before." (Trump, August 8, 2017)"Fire and fury" is pretty vague, and the "likes of which this world has never seen before" is needlessly mysterious. The population of the DPRK is less than 26 million - you don't need unprecedented fire and fury to destroy it; ordinary, well-precedented fire and fury should be a sufficient threat, provided that Kim Jong-Un (or the person holding his reins) believes we have the ability and willingness to use it.
The United States is, militarily, one of the most powerful countries in the world. Everyone knows we have guns, missiles, and bombs; we even give our marines swords just to make sure all our bases are covered. We're obviously capable of wiping out a country less than a tenth our size - if Trump wants a threat to be believable and compelling, he shouldn't emphasize the destructive power of our promised response, he should emphasize the ease with which we can respond and the futility of the DPRK's resistance to that response. And he should use details!
Show, don't tell!
Perhaps more importantly, though, the promised response needs to present a believable escalation. Threatening excessive force if a target does not accede to an unreasonable demand is the sort of thing that's only believable if it's coming from a psychopath.
It's unclear how exactly Trump is defining threats - announcements? Missile tests? What does it mean for North Korea to continue making threats? In the most general sense, countries make threats all the time, so demanding that the DPRK cease all threatening behavior seems more than a bit unreasonable.
And the degree of violence being threatened is greatly out of proportion with the problem. Trump's threat promises extreme preemptive retaliation (one would think that an oxymoron, but how else do you describe it?), but raining down death and destruction on a tiny country on the other side of the world because they said something that upset us wouldn't be escalation, it would be genocide.
Furthermore, it feels more than a bit hypocritical for a country that makes a big deal about free speech to tell another totalitarian regime to 'shut up or else'. The United States promising to obliterate a country if they do not accede to such a demand is simply not believable. That sort of one-sided attack would quickly propel us into the role of the world's chief villain. It's just not a believable response from the United States, a country which bargains for the better treatment of other countries' citizens. From a writing stand point, it's just too far out of character for us.
Much like 'promising' to kill someone if they attempt to punch you, Trump's threat was not intimidating; it was a vacuous statement about as meaningful as actually grabbing a ruler and unzipping his pants. (Also, only slightly longer than one of his tweets.)
So what does a good threat look like?
A threat needs to tell a story, and a good threat follows many of the same rules as a good story. The characters should act in a believable way, following realistic motivations and adhering to logical constraints, and the action should be detailed and specific. The more passionate, blustery part should be saved for later, after the story's credibility has been established for the reader.
The particular example that came to mind was this speech, delivered by President Harry S. Truman, June 7, 1945:
"There can be no peace in the world until the military power of Japan is destroyed with the same completeness as was the power of the European dictators. To do that, we are now in the process of deploying millions of our armed forces against Japan in a mass movement of troops and supplies and weapons over 14,000 miles, a military and naval feat unequaled in all history. Substantial portions of Japan's key industrial centers have been leveled to the ground in a series of record incendiary raids. What has already happened to Tokyo will happen to every Japanese city whose industries feed the Japanese war machine. If the Japanese insist on continuing resistance - beyond the point of reason - their country will suffer the same destruction as Germany. Our blows will destroy their whole modern industrial plant and organization which they have built up over the past century, and which they are now devoting to a hopeless cause. We have no desire or intention to destroy or enslave the Japanese people, but only surrender can prevent the kind of ruin which they have seen come to Germany as a result of continued, useless resistance." (Truman, June 7, 1945)Our 33rd president made it clear what was expected and provided a detailed description of the consequences for continued opposition. Furthermore, he expressed openly that we had no desire to do further harm to Japan, and made a public promise of clemency if our expectations were met. That promise of mercy made the demand - total surrender - much more reasonable. As a result, it was a believable threat.
The Problem with Threats
Despite Truman's eloquence and carefully chosen words, Japan persisted, believing they were calling a bluff. As a result, two months later on August 6, 1945, we leveled Hiroshima with an atomic bomb. A single weapon killed tens of thousands of people in mere seconds. It was no longer a threat, or a promise; it was truly fire and fury the likes of which the world had never seen.
And yet Japan persisted. Despite the horrifying death toll, with no apparent retaliation or resistance possible from their end, they refused to accept our terms of surrender.
Seventy two years ago to the day, Truman returned to the airwaves to make another statement:
"My fellow Americans, the British, Chinese and United States governments have given the Japanese people adequate warning of what is in store for them. The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. If Japan does not surrender, bombs will have to be dropped on her war industries and unfortunately thousands of civilian lives will be lost."Perhaps most powerfully he added:
"I urge Japanese civilians to leave industrial cities immediately and save themselves."That same day, August 9, 1945, we demonstrated our commitment to the end of the war by destroying Nagasaki with a second attack. Japan finally surrendered 5 days later.
There shouldn't be any doubt that there's a vast difference between the commanding, authoritative tone of President Truman and the temperamental authoritarianism of President Trump. Unfortunately, the relevance of that difference is perhaps debatable.
In June of 1945, Truman was addressing a losing nation. The Japanese Empire had briefly spanned a large portion of the Pacific, seized control of coastal China, and conquered numerous surrounding countries - by the summer of 1945, the Empire had been carved apart by the Allies, who'd focused their efforts on capturing targets of greatest strategic value. With supply lines severed and military forces scattered and isolated, defeat was inevitable for Japan; the only thing left for Japan was to make their defeat as costly for the allies as possible. A full Allied invasion of Japan itself could not be repulsed, but its military was prepared to kill as many Allied soldiers as possible before it fell. Given this dedication, their surrender came only after we decisively proved the absolute asymmetry of their situation. After Truman's carefully worded threats, his final ultimatum had to be written in the irradiated blood of over two hundred thousand Japanese citizens. Once began, a war of tragedy and atrocity could only end with more of the same.
Now, over seven decades later, our commander-in-chief is trading petulant threats with someone who is almost certainly less concerned with the welfare of his people than the Emperor of Japan ever was.
Although not confined to the boundaries of his country the way his people have been, the DPRK's supreme leader can only understand conflict between the United States and Korea in a hypothetical sense. While his own father would have been about 10 years old when the United States and North Korea last fought, at 33 years old, Kim Jong-Un is more than a generation removed from the violence of the Korean War.
Similarly, born 53 weeks after Truman issued his threat to Japan in June of 1945, Donald Trump has never lived in a world where the United States wasn't a nuclear super power, and he has never witnessed the "fire and fury" of nuclear warfare. (And I'd lay good odds that he will tweet something offensive about Hiroshima and Nagasaki today.)
In short, neither the millennial nor the baby-boomer really has the life experience or educational background to understand the "fire and fury" they're playing with. It seems fairly unlikely to me that either of these men is actually interested in avoiding conflict, and even less likely that either of them understands how to do so.
The way I see it, the reality is this: whether you're talking about threats or promises, neither really works until after you've already followed through on them. Up until the point violence begins, threats do not reliably work.
If someone is actively seeking conflict, you will not avert conflict by promising them conflict.
Maybe we should go back to the cake.
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James N. McDonald is a "liberal academic" born and raised in Missouri and residing in Tennessee. He holds one degree in history, two degrees in psychology, but loves writing fiction. His first, completed novel, The Rise of Azraea, Book I, is a high fantasy story with elements of comic fantasy and satire targeting present day, real world issues such as economic inequity, and sexual and racial discrimination. It is currently available on Amazon.
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