North Korea's relationship with the world has been shifting uncomfortably through the new Trump administration.
This is what Trump should do - and I'm not a Trump supporter by any means. Trump should tromp in there with his hat down and offer to build a bunch of Trump Hotels in Pyongyang and all up and down the mountainous coasts of North Korea and turn the country into a massive tourist attraction and invite the whole international community in droves - even Americans plus Canadians, Europeans, Saudis, the whole international community - and create a whole tourism industry; invite other non-Trump competitors like Marriott or whomever, insert huge amounts of jobs and money into the country, and North Korea could change radically overnight. It would be comparable to Izmir, at the western coast of Turkey, a liberal bastion in a country which has been descending into chaos. But North Korea is much smaller than Turkey, so the country could transform overnight. As more North Koreans gain access to monetary resources, they will gain the freedom/ability to do all sorts of things:
- Visit other countries
- Study abroad
- Live in other countries
- Return home with education
In addition, it would be very comical if Trump could stroll in there like a Loud Howard, establish rapport with this Jong-Un, and hold a big press conference him and his buddy Dennis Rodman. Trump and Jong-Un are natural allies. They could shake hands and grin like jerks in front of 1940s-looking cameras as Trump monteizes the shit out of North Korea. Even the Jong-un regime will be happy with their new cash cow. Imagine Koreans on both sides free to work and study on both sides of the demilitarized zone, maybe even get those land mines out of there. As North Korea develops a middle class it will gradually drift towards democracy. Death camps will be exposed and closed.
What will China think of all this? China needs to be on our side because they know they can't control this guy. You know what would be great? Or terrible? If USA and China establish some big bilateral trade deal while Japan and Australia and everyone else goes ahead with the TPP and these two economic blocs try to rival each other; that is to say, imagine if Trump jump-skips the US like a jet ski from the TPP side to China's side but have everything else remain more or less the same. The Philippines will follow us. Why does China even need a US buffer? Perhaps a reunification of Korea could occur, in the decades to come, perhaps even as a highly-functional democracy with which both China and the US agree to respect that - *as a democracy* - it can and will pivot frequently between radically pro-USA and pro-China agendas. Perhaps one day such shifts won't matter.
And don't forget the Russians. The current flair of tension is because Hillary Clinton and the DNC have chosen to blame Russia for there being a President Trump, rather than take responsibility for their own actions. It's less about the Syria war, which has more or less maintained the status quo since Trump hit Assad. Let's predict something. If LePen wins, will the mainstream blame Russia? It's still early enough to take bets. I'd put it on yes, they'll blame the shit out of Russia, but we can only see, if that happens. My point is that countries with healthy and strong democracies and social systems have not pivoted towards Russia; Wilders lost, support for AfD is waning, and now we're all just waiting to see if France goes one way or the other. Either way, Europe will survive, even without France, they'll survive; the other 26 plus a strong Euro currency backed by reliable and dependable Germany will maintain the participation of tons of awesome states like Spain and Czech Republic and maybe one day Serbia and Albania and still stand as a bastion of things like European values and a government that recognizes the reality of climate change and giving a shit about the environment and workers rights while the United States continues to hand itself away to corporate powers. France will be France. The UK will be the UK. The UK needs to urgently fix its housing crisis by building more Londons and less suburbs, and France, too, needs to combat ethnic segregation by building additional highly-functional urban centers (additional to the highly-functional urban centers France already has) in which all religious and ethnic groups can buy flats in the same neighborhoods and sit in benches in the same parks. It is in fact the recent decades of high suburbanization in Europe, as in the United States, which has led it into this political, economic, and social turmoil. You can blame ethnicities from the desert, and you might have a point but the youth are radicalized at home. Only integration can combat segregation, which a lot of European countries have a high degree of. Ethnic segregation leads to separate schools, separate neighborhoods, separate cities, separate streams of cultural communication, separate societal mythologies which become about one another.
My point is that after this cycle of elections will subside, perhaps we can collect cohesion between Europe and the ARC Arctic Powers; America, Russia, and China; to form a kind of EARC (pronounced like 'ear'). Canada is like the South Africa of this. This is the point I've been getting to the entire time: Let's right now today build a Bering Strait Bridge. Let's make certain it is for passenger trains and for bicycles, and then for automobiles, which are necessary to include humanity's enormous driving segment, especially in one of the two countries of my proposed bridge, good old USA. Trump, you're smart, I *dare* you to build this bridge. *This should have been done already.* It's time for a Bering Strait Bridge. Some men want to put the world on this or that calendar; some want to start a cult; I just want there to be a Bering Strait Bridge, even if somebody else builds it, in fact especially that way because how the fuck am I going to build a bridge, but that's why I'm saying it must necessarily contain the spaces for **functional** human transport, passenger trains and bicycles rather than cars. Even self-driving cars are not functional; they do not solve the critical and long-term infrastructural problems caused by car-dependence; the massive concrete plains we have built to park our cars in have hampered our physical and psychological health and our ability ever go anywhere on foot, and together with the lawns we grew for no reason, they are preventing the trees, flowers, and flower-dependents like bees from coming back. This suburbanization is happening in many, many countries; not just USA. Why is it that the next thousand cities humanity will build are more likely to look like Detroit warehouse parking lots than, say, Prague? What effect will that have on humanity? When we land on Mars, are we going to stick everybody into groups of three in single-family-home shoeboxes in which they will be trapped forever until they run out of resources; or will they look more like, say, San Sebastian, Spain, which you should all go look at in Google Maps? Will giving humanity the ability to *walk* and *interact with their neighbors* finally start to make people well-adjusted? Everyone wants to see liberal Canada in the EU, sure, but what if we could hook up Europe to the ARC Powers on free movement of people and a passenger train? The entire world will transform overnight as average people on four continents - counting Europe with the rest of Asia as one, plus two Americas plus Africa which has also been unionizing while you weren't paying attention. This is about the Bering Strait Bridge. I will produce illustrations of this bridge. American, Russian, Chinese, even Canadian and Japanese and European and whoever else's engineers are welcome to come turn this bridge into a spectacular and world-known tourist attraction like the Golden Gate Bridge but maybe in a sleek black like the shadow of a glacier, titanium like a new bicycle - or some completely different material, I'm not on the engineering team - but earthquake resistant, attractive like the Brooklyn Bridge, or maybe even a tunnel like the Chunnel but with a bridge connecting the Diomedes Islands, who cares, even if it's some obnoxious piece of modern art, as long as it gets trains, bicycles, and (for now) automobiles through there, I want this bridge built. It's really important that all three methods of transport are included. Humanity is overdue for this. You might be thinking, who will bike all that? I fucking will, and so will tons of other people because everybody wants to do that kind of shit, and for those who don't want to bike it, just having walking-distance access to a train station which can bring you to Mexico and Portugal will inspire lots of people to just try it, young and old, and then humanity will start to flow in currents like the spiraling oceans, and we will be released from our suburban cabin fever. We need to encourage all countries to make it super-easy to bring in and send out international students and workers. In Europe they have begun to achieve this regionally, but in North America we're going to spend twenty billion dollars on a wall, and even after Mexico it's still still just more walls all the way down plus a good solid border with Canada. But South America is opening. Good for them. So is CARICOM, the Caribbean community. North America, ironically, may be one of the most difficult continents to integrate. But it's not impossible. We just have to fix the twin crises of urban planning and public transport - suburbanization - in the United States and Canada and even Mexico; in America. That brings me to my second point, which is that we are going to put the United States on the Metric System, even if I have to do it myself. There is no excuse for such a delay in this stupidly simple imperative of ours.
