When President John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev brought the world to the brink of annihilation in 1961 over the precarious position of Cuba on the Cold War-era map of the world, it was the closest the U.S. and Russia had come to making direct war on each other without any Chinese middlemen adding enough distance between, as Commodore Perry called them, the “Saxon and the Cossack.” The crisis in Cuba was an insane piece of dick-measuring and Kennedy’s darkest moment, a staring contest that could have wiped out all life, culture, and history. Two imperialist nations of approximately the same size and influence were locked in an odd combination of proxy actions and military posturing, and both found that staring contest coming to a head that neither actually wanted—the mutually assured destruction of the two most influential nations in the world and the post-nuclear nightmare that would result.
As Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un set themselves to square off in a rabbit-hole version of that same staring contest, it’s so distressing because destruction is precisely what both sides seem to desire most. On Kim’s side, mocked up images of DPRK missiles hitting U.S….