Was Obama ready to bomb Pyongyang? ‘Never,’ allies say

WASHINGTON — The United States was on the brink of war. As President Barack Obama prepared to leave office, he was contemplating yet another conflict in Asia, where the United States had already fought twice since the 1950s without winning. This time, the enemy had nuclear weapons. The potential for devastation was enormous.

Wait a minute — don’t remember Obama’s near-war with North Korea? Neither do the people who were working for Obama at the time.

But President Donald Trump has been telling audiences lately that his predecessor was on the precipice of an all-out confrontation with the nuclear-armed maverick state. The way Trump tells the story, the jets were practically scrambling in the hangars.

“I believe he would have gone to war with North Korea,” Trump said in the White House Rose Garden on Friday. “I think he was ready to go to war. In fact, he told me he was so close to starting a big war with North Korea.”

The notion that Obama, who famously equivocated about a single missile strike against non-nuclear Syria to punish it for using chemical weapons against its own civilians, would have started a full-fledged war with North Korea seems hard to imagine, to say the least. But this presumption has become part of Trump’s narrative in patting himself on the back for reaching out to North Korea to make peace.