It fell upon increasingly bedraggled Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to explain why it’s perfectly appropriate for a U.S. president to vow a response of “fire and fury like the world has never seen” in a kind of tit-for-tat, bluster-for-bluster war of outlandish rhetoric with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. America’s top diplomat called it a “strong” message that the dictator “would understand because he doesn’t seem to understand diplomatic language.”
Despite Tillerson’s game effort to normalize entirely abnormal behavior, let’s set the record straight: U.S. presidents don’t engage in such bursts of madness. They don’t stoop to Kim’s level. And they especially don’t threaten some kind of pre-emptive nuclear strike with a dictator who is widely regarded as isolated, unpredictable and possibly unstable. Wars have been started over lesser examples of verbal sparring, and the stakes in the region are frighteningly high.
This was a week when progress was actually made in bringing economic pressure to bear on North Korea through international cooperation. The $1 billion sanctions approved by the United Nations Security Council last weekend might not deter North Korea from further developing its nuclear missile capability, but it’s far more effective than saber-rattling. Where exactly does Trump stand on North Korea? It’s hard to tell because he’s been all over the place.
There was the Donald Trump of last year’s campaign who would be “honored” to meet with President Kim and share hamburgers with him. There’s the one who was counting on China to take control of the situation. And now there’s the president who supports the sanctions (even claiming on Twitter that the “Fake News Media” has underplayed their importance) before going Dr. Strangelove less than 48 hours later while on vacation in New Jersey. Which one is supposed to be taken seriously?
Maybe it’s boring for a president to act like a grownup in foreign policy, particularly when the stakes are so high. Maybe it doesn’t make you the center of attention. Perhaps it’s even personally rewarding to give Kim a taste of his own medicine. But that’s not what Americans need from their president. As Sen. John McCain recently observed, great leaders don’t threaten unless they’re ready to act. Either President Trump just wants to provoke—which is clearly unhelpful—or he’s genuinely prepared to back up his bombast with military action. Neither would be wise, but the latter choice was absolutely unthinkable until perhaps Tuesday.