Back in July, President Donald Trump was already escalating his rhetoric
against North Korea as it became clear the rogue state was on the brink
of a major breakthrough in its nuclear program, development of a
ballistic missile capable of striking the continental United States.
Still, he insisted, “I don’t draw red lines,” and wouldn’t be sucked
into doing so.
But that was before North Korea conducted its largest nuclear weapon
test ever and sent missiles flying directly over Japan. And before Trump
threatened “fire and fury” and declared a North Korean bomb capable of
reaching the United States “unacceptable.” And before Lt. Gen. H.R.
McMaster, his national security adviser, warned on Friday that, all talk
to the contrary, “there is a military option.”
All of which means that, whether he calls it one or not, Trump now has a
red line – a move that a number of U.S. national security hands I’ve
spoken with recently consider to be a serious and even “self-inflicted”
escalation of what has become a genuine crisis with North Korea. In
fact, Trump’s bluster may be more genuine than his reputation for
bombast over action suggests: Two Republican veterans of previous
administrations told me that McMaster has repeated those public warnings
about a serious consideration of military options in private sessions
at which they were present.
“The point that the Trump administration seems to be making is that if
North Korea achieves an ICBM capability, that is a missile that can
reliably reach the United States with a nuclear weapon, that changes
everything. Well, it doesn’t. It never has,” says retired Adm. Dennis
Blair, the former director of U.S. national intelligence, in a new
interview for The Global Politico. “This hyping of the nuclear missile,
which is merely one form of delivering a weapon, being able to reach the
United States is a self-inflicted policy disadvantage which this
administration has placed on itself.”of a major breakthrough in its nuclear program, development of a
ballistic missile capable of striking the continental United States.
Still, he insisted, “I don’t draw red lines,” and wouldn’t be sucked
into doing so.
But that was before North Korea conducted its largest
nuclear weapon test ever and sent missiles flying directly over Japan.
And before Trump threatened “fire and fury” and declared a North Korean
bomb capable of reaching the United States “unacceptable.” And before
Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, his national security adviser, warned on Friday
that, all talk to the contrary, “there is a military option.”
All of which means that, whether he calls it one or not,
Trump now has a red line – a move that a number of U.S. national
security hands I’ve spoken with recently consider to be a serious and
even “self-inflicted” escalation of what has become a genuine crisis
with North Korea. In fact, Trump’s bluster may be more genuine than his
reputation for bombast over action suggests: Two Republican veterans of
previous administrations told me that McMaster has repeated those public
warnings about a serious consideration of military options in private
sessions at which they were present.
“The point that the Trump administration seems to be making
is that if North Korea achieves an ICBM capability, that is a missile
that can reliably reach the United States with a nuclear weapon, that
changes everything. Well, it doesn’t. It never has,” says retired Adm.
Dennis Blair, the former director of U.S. national intelligence, in a
new interview for The Global Politico. “This hyping of the nuclear
missile, which is merely one form of delivering a weapon, being able to
reach the United States is a self-inflicted policy disadvantage which
this administration has placed on itself.”
The North Koreans will soon cross Trump’s ICBM threshold if they haven’t already
. “And
so what’s the United States going to do at that point?” says Blair, a
longtime Asia hand who also served as commander of the U.S. Pacific
Fleet in charge of carrying out U.S. war plans against North Korea
during an earlier round of tensions. “It’s something we’ve said is
unacceptable. You don’t say something’s unacceptable in my experience
unless you can do something about it…. If you put a red line out there,
you have to be able to enforce it at acceptable cost, if your enemy
miscalculates and the line is crossed.”
So now that Trump has his red line (never mind his
previously stated belief that red lines, like the one President Obama
famously drew with Syria over its use of chemical weapons, are “very
dumb”), does that mean the war scare this time is real?
Is Trump actually prepared to do what three previous U.S.
presidents—for the obvious reason that the costs could be unfathomably
high—were not?
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