Victor Cha was about to become ambassador to South Korea — until he criticized Trump’s plan for a preemptive strike on Pyongyang.
Donald Trump has provided no shortage of ominous signals about his intentions for the Korean peninsula. The president has vowed to meet any gesture of aggression from Pyongyang with a devastating nuclear attack “like the world has never seen”; boasted that his nuclear button is “bigger and more powerful” than Kim Jong-un’s; and said, while posing for a group photograph with his highest-ranking military advisers, “You guys know what this represents? Maybe it’s the calm before the storm.”
Still, as unnerving as these remarks were, it wasn’t hard to dismiss them as the weightless provocations of a reality star-in-chief. The president shouldn’t issue belligerent threats that have no relation to his administration’s actual foreign policy. But he does so all the time. Thus, so long as the signs of imminent war were coming from Trump’s Twitter feed — and not from his administration’s concrete actions — it was possible to believe that the White House understood that dropping a few missiles on Pyongyang would accomplish nothing beyond the deaths of thousands of innocents.
But the administration’s rejection of Victor Cha is a different story. For months, Cha had been preparing to become America’s next ambassador to South Korea. A former director of Asia policy in the George W. Bush administration, Cha is widely respected in Seoul, and widely regarded as a “hawk” on foreign-policy questions in Washington. In December, the White House formally notified the South Korean government that Trump would ask the Senate to confirm Cha to the ambassadorship.
Less than two months later, Cha is no longer under consideration for the post. The White House has leaked word that the reversal was caused by a “red flag” in Cha’s background. But this explanation is difficult to reconcile with the timing of the move: When the administration informed Seoul that Cha was its man, the White House had already been vetting the ambassador for months.
