Foreign desk: North Korea Threat-Theater Is Working
President Trump’s heated rhetorical exchanges with North Korea have led the mainstream news media to dismiss him as incompetent, but Austin Bay at The Observer says even The Washington Post has “finally noticed the intent and utility” of Trump’s “orchestrated information warfare.” Indeed, Trump “decided to give North Korea a relentless dose of its own threat-theater bombast.” It’s an operation, he says, that “Kim Jong-un and his regime have not confronted, especially one executed by an American president.” But the US and its allies have also backed these verbal assaults “with shows of powerful and credible military force.” And all this “forces the Kim regime to recognize the geo-strategic situation has changed in ways that the regime did not expect and cannot control.”