Why Our Beef With North Korea Is Mostly Theatrics

Thanks to the growing threat of nuclear war between the United States and North Korea, I'll finally get to live my Fallout-inspired dream of fending off hammer-wielding psychos in the irradiated wastelands of America by day and struggling to wrap my head around the existential horror of being a walking remnant of humanity's mistakes by night. Hooray!

At least, that's the sense we'd all have if we were only paying attention to the surface-level of Trump's blustery, tough-guy dick-waggling contest with North Korea's Kim Jong-un (who is clearly living out some weird Tom Hanks Big scenario). North Korea has a long history of saying they're going to nuke whoever looks at them funny as they throw their annual temper tantrum. But it's not often that an American president responds by brandishing the jagged edges of a beer bottle he's broken over his head.

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He makes it seem as if diplomacy is plan "F". "A" through "E" are pictures of mushroom clouds.

Trump is a showman. You think dropping the biggest non-nuclear bomb the U.S. military has ever created was intended to cripple ISIS? Remember, this is the same who guy wanted his inauguration parade to include tanks and missile launchers to show the world America's military might. You know, like totally stable countries like North Korea and Russia do all the time. Living Jeff Dunham puppet Mike Pence dared to stare down North Korea because he "thought it was important that people on the other side of the DMZ see our resolve in my face."

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"C'mon, Mikey. Put on your Big Boy face and show the mean men who's boss."

It was an act dreamed up by the kind of people whose dicks chub when they watch Patton. Then there was the "armada" sailing toward North Korea in a show of America's military might that turned out to be a lie. The ships were actually sailing in the opposite direction.

Trump is putting on this huge show of strength to scare a leader who doesn't give a shit. Here's how you can tell. North Korea tested some missiles, so Trump was all:

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So Kim Jong-un did the jerk-off hand motion and was all:

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Why put on a show when the enemy can see right through it? It must be a part of Trump's sinister masterplan to purchase land on California's coast and antagonize North Korea into nuking the San Andreas Fault to dislodge his chunk of California into the ocean, giving Trump prize beachfront property to build more hotels and casinos! Of course! It all makes sense!

The truth is actually really boring, and that's why it's not front and center. All of it is military theater to distract Trump's supporters from the fact that he's handling North Korea with the exact boring old diplomacy as Obama, as Bush, as Clinton -- as every administration that's had to deal with North Korea, U.N. sanctions , and trying to use China's influence over North Korea to ...

... sorry, I dozed off mid-sentence because diplomacy is a boring TV show with low ratings. Trump knows you'd rather watch Game Of Thrones than C-SPAN.

A cursory Googling of Trump's previous thoughts on how to handle North Korea reveal a handful of conflicting strategies. Only one of them is the strategy that's been working for decades. Another was just a napkin drawing of The Expendables and The Fast and the Furious crew stomping on Kim Jong-un's head.

Trump would have found a way to be the tough-guy cowboy president his base loves and do things the grown-up way at the same time. Kind of brilliant. But also know that Trump recently demonstrated he can't even understand a metaphor once spoken by George W. Bush, the former standard for presidential dimwits.

He has no idea why the Civil War was fought and thinks Andrew Jackson was alive to see it. There's an extremely high chance none of this is coming from him. If we got pure, uncut Donald Trump diplomacy he would have been whacking golf balls into an irradiated crater where North Korea used to be off the deck of an aircraft carrier the day after his favorables dropped below 40 percent.

None of this is to say that North Korea and the U.S. won't eventually fulfill our Terminator 2: Judgement Day nuclear holocaust destinies. Tensions are still rising. But we're not on the brink yet ... it just feels that way some days. The thing we should be really worried about is that Trump might be too dumb to realize that by putting out all that fake masculine posturing intended to scare the shit out of the bad guys, he's also scaring the shit out of us.

The proliferation of beer pong and craft beer may have you think that we're living in one of the peak times to get drunk, but humans have been getting famously hammered for millennia. Like a frat house's lawn after a kegger, history is littered with world changing events that were secretly powered by booze. The inaugural games of the Roman Coliseum, the drafting of the U.S. Constitution and the Russian Revolution were all capped off by major parties that most attendees probably regretted in the morning.

Join Jack O'Brien and Cracked staffers Carmen Angelica, Alex Schmidt, Michael Swaim, plus comedian Blake Wexler for a retelling of history's biggest moments you didn't realize everyone was drunk for.

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For more check out 6 Reasons North Korea is the Funniest Evil Dictatorship Ever and 5 Insane Petty Crimes Committed by North Korea.

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