Trump takes leaf out of Kim’s speech book
Adam Taylor comment
As talk spread of North Korea’s nuclear weapons capabilities yesterday, President Trump responded with a warning.
“North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States,” Trump said at an event at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club. “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” The President then repeated that North Korea “will be met with the fire and fury and, frankly, power, the likes of which this world has never seen before” if it continued with this behaviour.
Given the high stakes, it was unusually aggressive language from a US president. Stranger still, this language has clear echoes to threats made by North Korea to the US and its allies.
In recent years, Pyongyang’s staterun Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) has repeatedly threatened to turn the South Korean capital, Seoul, into a “sea of fire” if attacked. North Korea has even produced propaganda videos imagining what such an attack might look like. Last year, the website DPRK Today released video of a simulated attack on Seoul. The video ended with the warning: “Everything will turn into ashes.”
Washington is often the target of similar threats from North Korea. On Monday, Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of the ruling Workers’ Party, warned that sanctions or other actions against Pyongyang would result in the US being “catapulted into an unimaginable sea of fire”.
In North Korea’s highly productive state media machine, bellicose language and over-the-top threats are virtually a cliche. When supreme leader Kim Jong Un ousted his uncle Jang Song Thaek in December 2013, KCNA described him as “despicable human scum Jang, who was worse than a dog, perpetrated thrice-cursed acts of treachery in betrayal of such profound trust and warmest paternal love shown by the party and the leader for him”.
US leaders have received somewhat similar treatment. KCNA once accused President Barack Obama of being a “clown” and said then-Secretary of State John Kerry had a “hideous lantern jaw”.
In June, a commentary in Rodong Sinmun called Trump a “psychopath” who might launch a pre-emptive strike on North Korea to distract from domestic problems.
The sheer frequency of these threats and insults has long made them easy to dismiss. Trump himself has spoken with relative kindness about Kim, calling him a “pretty smart cookie” in an interview in April.
Now that developments have made clear that North Korea’s weapons programme is developing and may soon, if not already, pose a threat to the US, Trump appears to have changed his rhetoric.
But in doing so, he may have set himself an impossible red line: The President warned of “fire and fury” not if North Korea carried out another missile test but if it made another threat. And North Korea often makes threats.