At the United Nations, Trump speaks loudly
Teddy Roosevelt embraced a principled standard for a muscular foreign policy when he repeated the West African proverb to “speak softly and carry a big stick.” President Trump — with his name-calling, annihilationthreatening harangue against North Korea before the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday — turned this standard on its head. “We will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea” if provoked, Trump vowed.
Set aside for a moment the deeply unsettling imagery of killing 25 million people, most of them suffering under Kim Jong Un’s totalitarian regime. Or the incongruity of such apocalyptic utterances before an assembly that, as Sen. Dianne Feinstein, DCalif., later pointed out, was created to “foster peace and global cooperation.”
Can this kind of tough-guy talk actually work? Call us skeptical.
Just ask Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, about the limitations of an attack on North Korea, which would likely unleash a barrage of missiles against South Korea and U.S. troops stationed there. “Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that 10 million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons ... there’s no military solution here," Bannon told The American Prospect.
And consider the record. In August, Trump promised “fire and fury like the world has never seen” raining down on North Korea if it threatened the United States. Kim has been testing missiles and explosives ever since.
Perhaps there’s a case for making Kim, and his Chinese enablers, think you are crazy enough to start a nuclear conflagration. But North Korea has for years threatened to reduce countries to ashes or sink them into a sea of fire, using language so over the top that it has become comical and lost its menace. Trump risks something similar with his bellicosity toward North Korea and Iran, which was sandwiched between more conventional calls for international cooperation.
Before the General Assembly, Trump rightly urged all nations to isolate Kim’s murderous regime. Then the president undermined that goal with the kind of tabloid bombast — “Rocket Man is on a suicide mission” — that raises Kim’s stature and makes him even more likely to cling to the nuclear arsenal that he thinks will guarantee his survival.
To be sure, the Obama-era policy of “strategic patience” toward North Korea was a failure. More assertive steps are necessary to deal with the threat of North Korea developing an intercontinental ballistic missile with a nuclear warhead that could reach the U.S.
Such efforts include even tougher economic sanctions than the ones approved in recent U.N. Security Council resolutions, as well as crackdowns on financial institutions that help Kim pay for his weapons program.
Meanwhile, Defense Secretary James Mattis has promised options — likely to include cyber sabotage and sophisticated missile interception programs — that could stymie Kim’s testing without provoking an attack on Seoul.
All of these are promising alternatives short of the devastating options Trump keeps blustering about. America’s 45th president needs to take a lesson from its 26th.