Back in July, President Donald Trump was already escalating his rhetoric
against North Korea as it became clear the rogue state was on the brink
of a major breakthrough in its nuclear program, development of a
ballistic missile capable of striking the continental United States.
Still, he insisted, “I don’t draw red lines,” and wouldn’t be sucked
into doing so.
But that was before North Korea conducted its largest nuclear weapon test ever and sent missiles flying directly over Japan. And before Trump threatened “fire and fury” and declared a North Korean bomb capable of reaching the United States “unacceptable.” And before Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, his national security adviser, warned on Friday that, all talk to the contrary, “there is a military option.”
All of which means that, whether he calls it one or not, Trump now has a red line – a move that a number of U.S. national security hands I’ve spoken with recently consider to be a serious and even “self-inflicted” escalation of what has become a genuine crisis with North Korea. In fact, Trump’s bluster may be more genuine than his reputation for bombast over action suggests: Two Republican veterans of previous administrations told me that McMaster has repeated those public warnings about a serious consideration of military options in private sessions at which they were present.
“The point that the Trump administration seems to be making is that if North Korea achieves an ICBM capability, that is a missile that can reliably reach the United States with a nuclear weapon, that changes everything. Well, it doesn’t. It never has,” says retired Adm. Dennis Blair, the former director of U.S. national intelligence, in a new interview for The Global Politico. “This hyping of the nuclear missile, which is merely one form of delivering a weapon, being able to reach the United States is a self-inflicted policy disadvantage which this administration has placed on itself.”of a major breakthrough in its nuclear program, development of a ballistic missile capable of striking the continental United States. Still, he insisted, “I don’t draw red lines,” and wouldn’t be sucked into doing so.
But that was before North Korea conducted its largest nuclear weapon test ever and sent missiles flying directly over Japan. And before Trump threatened “fire and fury” and declared a North Korean bomb capable of reaching the United States “unacceptable.” And before Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, his national security adviser, warned on Friday that, all talk to the contrary, “there is a military option.”
All of which means that, whether he calls it one or not, Trump now has a red line – a move that a number of U.S. national security hands I’ve spoken with recently consider to be a serious and even “self-inflicted” escalation of what has become a genuine crisis with North Korea. In fact, Trump’s bluster may be more genuine than his reputation for bombast over action suggests: Two Republican veterans of previous administrations told me that McMaster has repeated those public warnings about a serious consideration of military options in private sessions at which they were present.
“The point that the Trump administration seems to be making is that if North Korea achieves an ICBM capability, that is a missile that can reliably reach the United States with a nuclear weapon, that changes everything. Well, it doesn’t. It never has,” says retired Adm. Dennis Blair, the former director of U.S. national intelligence, in a new interview for The Global Politico. “This hyping of the nuclear missile, which is merely one form of delivering a weapon, being able to reach the United States is a self-inflicted policy disadvantage which this administration has placed on itself.”
The North Koreans will soon cross Trump’s ICBM threshold if they haven’t already. “And so what’s the United States going to do at that point?” says Blair, a longtime Asia hand who also served as commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet in charge of carrying out U.S. war plans against North Korea during an earlier round of tensions. “It’s something we’ve said is unacceptable. You don’t say something’s unacceptable in my experience unless you can do something about it…. If you put a red line out there, you have to be able to enforce it at acceptable cost, if your enemy miscalculates and the line is crossed.”
So now that Trump has his red line (never mind his previously stated belief that red lines, like the one President Obama famously drew with Syria over its use of chemical weapons, are “very dumb”), does that mean the war scare this time is real?
Is Trump actually prepared to do what three previous U.S. presidents—for the obvious reason that the costs could be unfathomably high—were not?
Read more: Twitter Man vs. Rocket Man – POLITICO
But that was before North Korea conducted its largest nuclear weapon test ever and sent missiles flying directly over Japan. And before Trump threatened “fire and fury” and declared a North Korean bomb capable of reaching the United States “unacceptable.” And before Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, his national security adviser, warned on Friday that, all talk to the contrary, “there is a military option.”
All of which means that, whether he calls it one or not, Trump now has a red line – a move that a number of U.S. national security hands I’ve spoken with recently consider to be a serious and even “self-inflicted” escalation of what has become a genuine crisis with North Korea. In fact, Trump’s bluster may be more genuine than his reputation for bombast over action suggests: Two Republican veterans of previous administrations told me that McMaster has repeated those public warnings about a serious consideration of military options in private sessions at which they were present.
“The point that the Trump administration seems to be making is that if North Korea achieves an ICBM capability, that is a missile that can reliably reach the United States with a nuclear weapon, that changes everything. Well, it doesn’t. It never has,” says retired Adm. Dennis Blair, the former director of U.S. national intelligence, in a new interview for The Global Politico. “This hyping of the nuclear missile, which is merely one form of delivering a weapon, being able to reach the United States is a self-inflicted policy disadvantage which this administration has placed on itself.”of a major breakthrough in its nuclear program, development of a ballistic missile capable of striking the continental United States. Still, he insisted, “I don’t draw red lines,” and wouldn’t be sucked into doing so.
But that was before North Korea conducted its largest nuclear weapon test ever and sent missiles flying directly over Japan. And before Trump threatened “fire and fury” and declared a North Korean bomb capable of reaching the United States “unacceptable.” And before Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, his national security adviser, warned on Friday that, all talk to the contrary, “there is a military option.”
All of which means that, whether he calls it one or not, Trump now has a red line – a move that a number of U.S. national security hands I’ve spoken with recently consider to be a serious and even “self-inflicted” escalation of what has become a genuine crisis with North Korea. In fact, Trump’s bluster may be more genuine than his reputation for bombast over action suggests: Two Republican veterans of previous administrations told me that McMaster has repeated those public warnings about a serious consideration of military options in private sessions at which they were present.
“The point that the Trump administration seems to be making is that if North Korea achieves an ICBM capability, that is a missile that can reliably reach the United States with a nuclear weapon, that changes everything. Well, it doesn’t. It never has,” says retired Adm. Dennis Blair, the former director of U.S. national intelligence, in a new interview for The Global Politico. “This hyping of the nuclear missile, which is merely one form of delivering a weapon, being able to reach the United States is a self-inflicted policy disadvantage which this administration has placed on itself.”
The North Koreans will soon cross Trump’s ICBM threshold if they haven’t already. “And so what’s the United States going to do at that point?” says Blair, a longtime Asia hand who also served as commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet in charge of carrying out U.S. war plans against North Korea during an earlier round of tensions. “It’s something we’ve said is unacceptable. You don’t say something’s unacceptable in my experience unless you can do something about it…. If you put a red line out there, you have to be able to enforce it at acceptable cost, if your enemy miscalculates and the line is crossed.”
So now that Trump has his red line (never mind his previously stated belief that red lines, like the one President Obama famously drew with Syria over its use of chemical weapons, are “very dumb”), does that mean the war scare this time is real?
Is Trump actually prepared to do what three previous U.S. presidents—for the obvious reason that the costs could be unfathomably high—were not?
Read more: Twitter Man vs. Rocket Man – POLITICO
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