Strange sense of deja vu over the NK missile tests

Here we go again.

Whenever North Korea launches a new long-range missile or does another nuclear test, President Trump condemns the test and warns Pyongyang not to do it again, while his generals and diplomats point out that it ‘‘threatens the entire world.’’

But latterly, the pattern has been evolving.

North Korea has carried out seven long-range missile tests and one underground nuclear explosion (its first hydrogen bomb) since Trump took office in January, and until August Trump’s language on these occasions was blood-curdling.

In July, when two ballistic missiles were tested, he said that any further North Korean threats ‘‘will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.’’

That was actually a threat to attack North Korea with nuclear weapons: Trump was deliberately using the same language, even the same phrases that Harry Truman had chosen to use in a warning message to Japan just before an ‘‘fire and fury’’ of July.

Has someone been getting at him? I suspect somebody has, and my leading candidates are the three generals who are now his closest advisers on this issue: Mattis at Defence, General H.R. McMaster, the National Security Adviser, and General John Kelly, Trump’s Chief of Staff.

In fact, I’m pretty sure it was mainly Kelly.

The other two generals have been in their jobs practically since Trump entered the White House, and although I’m sure that they tried to talk sense to him about North Korea, it didn’t seem to be having much effect.

Whereas Kelly only took up his job in late July (so the timing works), and since then he has had more face time with the president than anybody else.

At any rate, Trump is behaving as if he has finally been persuaded of the strategic realities by the generals who now surround him.

None of them believes that a war in the Korean Peninsula would be a good thing for the United States, and they will have been working hard to persuade the US President to accept that fact.

It looks like they have succeeded.

Don’t expect Trump to go public and explain to Americans that