Fury and futility
Fire and fury are not the first words in the diplomatic lexicon, as it turns out, for good reason. President Trump’s chief innovation in North Korea relations — matching Kim Jong Un’s reckless provocations with his own — hasn’t achieved any desirable result.
Quite the opposite: Since Trump updated Nixon’s madman theory, Kim has responded by shooting a missile across Japan’s bow and test-driving a more powerful nuclear bomb. Far from dissuading the callow dictator from his chosen course of ever-escalating threats against America and its allies, Trump has encouraged him. The president’s unhinged rhetoric fulfills North Korean paranoia and elevates Kim’s stature as an adversary deserving presidential notice.
Of course, no one should have expected Trump to solve a Korean conundrum that has defeated far more qualified presidents. The hope now has to be that he will avoid turning crisis into catastrophe.
The difficult truth is that North Korea’s position on the doorstep of U.S. allies South Korea and Japan effectively eliminated a military solution long ago, and its advancing capacity to level a nuclear strike at California and beyond makes preemptive force even less thinkable.
That leaves diplomacy, which is not furthered by Trump’s counterproductive criticism of South Korea, the country with the most at stake, or his loose talk of a trade war with Pyongyang’s only ally, China.
Likewise the “fire and fury” nonsense, which seems to have been calculated for no purpose other than to make Trump look and feel strong. While stern warnings certainly have a place in diplomacy, the danger of the president’s fulminations, as former National Security Agency chief Michael Hayden recently told CNN, is that they are not just “very tough” but “very imprecise.”
Granted, negotiating with an amoral regime is not nearly as gratifying as vowing to annihilate it from the face of the earth. But a responsibility as immense as the presidency requires that personal gratification be subsumed to such greater imperatives as national and international security.