The Daily 202: Missile test underscores the failure of Trump's naive approach to North Korea

[DonViejo]

By James Hohmann July 5 at 7:12 AM

THE BIG IDEA: Donald Trump made a bold pronouncement in the weeks before he became president that is not aging well.

Link to tweet

The U.S. government confirmed last night that North Korea successfully tested an intercontinental ballistic missile, crossing a chilling threshold and underscoring Trump’s failure to change the trajectory of dictator Kim Jong Un’s nuclear program over the past six months.

-snip-

-- The past three presidents have tried to negotiate, only to learn that Pyongyang can never be trusted. Reflecting the hubris of someone who believes he alone can fix things, Trump’s “it will not happen” tweet came two months after Barack Obama warned him privately that North Korea would likely be the single most urgent problem he confronted as president. Several aides from the last administration also told their incoming counterparts that the missile program should be their top national security priority.

-- Trump naively thought he could persuade China to pressure North Korea to stop its nuclear activities. Then President Xi Jinping tutored him on the history of the region when they met at Mar-a-Lago in April. “After listening for 10 minutes, I realized that it’s not so easy,” the president admitted afterward, recounting the history lesson. “You know, I felt pretty strongly that they had a tremendous power over North Korea. But it’s not what you would think.”

-- During the transition, Trump appeared to embrace “the madman theory” of foreign policy. The president-elect believed he could use his reputation for unpredictability to unnerve and intimidate America’s adversaries into making concessions that they would not otherwise make. Some people close to Trump thought, for example, that North Korea might come to the table out of fear that the American president might just be crazy enough to take preemptive military action. (I wrote last December about why this was both risky and likely to fail, as it did when Richard Nixon first tried it during Vietnam.)

-- During the campaign, Trump also expressed openness to South Korea and Japan developing their own nuclear weapons. “They'd probably wipe them out pretty quick,” Trump said during a Wisconsin rally in March 2016, musing flippantly about a thermonuclear confrontation with North Korea. “If they fight, you know what, that'd be a terrible thing. … But if they do, they do. Good luck, enjoy yourself, folks.”

more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2017/07/05/daily-202-missile-test-underscores-the-failure-of-trump-s-naive-approach-to-north-korea/595bf674e9b69b7071abca58

[Iliyah]

1. Our lovely corporate media is salivrating with delight that a possible conflict

may happen.

[Orsino]

2. How about we replace the word "naive" with "lazy"?

Isn't it at least as likely that his history of other people doing his homework lies at the root of all his presidential "policy"? Wasn't he simply hoping that China's proximity to NK would lead them to solve the problem without Dumb Donald having to think about it?

[Not Ruth]

3. Went back to Facebook today, nice to know the world is safe again

This is what China officially posted

Chinese President #XiJinping met with his Russian counterpart #VladimirPutin here on Tuesday, when the two leaders reached consensus on issues concerning #KoreanPeninsula, the deployment of anti-missile system in Europe and Asia-Pacific, and the chemical weapon issue in Syria.

https://www.facebook.com/chineseconsulatesf/posts/1461461120579067:0

[gratuitous]

4. What would realDonaldTrump say about President Trump?

Would he call such a president "weak" or "incompetent"? Would he call that president a loser? Would he rev up his fans and followers with all kinds of bloviating about how much better he'd do than the "sad" antics of the president?