\u201cWhile I greatly appreciate the efforts of President Xi & China to help with North Korea, it has not worked out. At least I know China tried!\u201d<\/b>
\nSometimes, Donald Trump\u2019s Twitter account publishes major presidential announcements. Other times, it posts whatever the nation\u2019s most prominent Fox News addict just yelled at his television screen.
The media has often mistaken the latter for the former. And on first blush, the president\u2019s latest tweet about North Korea seems a likely candidate for overinterpretation.
On Monday, University of Virginia student Otto Warmbier died, days after being released from a North Korean prison in a comatose state. During a trip to North Korea in January 2016, Warmbier was detained at the Pyongyang airport on charges of trying to take down a propaganda poster. He was convicted less than two months later and sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. When Warmbier was returned to his family in Ohio last week, he was unable to see, speak, or acknowledge verbal commands.
\u201cIt\u2019s a total disgrace what happened to Otto, \u201d Trump told reporters Tuesday.
The president once argued that China was more than capable of coercing North Korea into abandoning its nuclear program and belligerent behavior \u2014 if Beijing only wanted to. But after listening to Chinese president Xi Jinping \u201cfor ten minutes, \u201d Trump \u201c realized it\u2019s not so easy.\u201d
Still, the president had expressed confidence that China would do its best to discipline North Korea through diplomatic pressure. So, it\u2019s quite possible that Trump was watching news reports about the death of an American student at North Korean hands Tuesday, and felt compelled to express his disappointment with the limitations of China\u2019s efforts. Which is to say: He was just spouting off about cable news \u2014 not signaling that America has given up on seeking a diplomatic solution to its conflict with Pyongyang.
But if Trump\u2019s tweet is just mindless bluster, that hardly makes it less unnerving. In their joint military exercises, the United States and South Korea have rehearsed preemptive strikes against North Korea, ones designed to kill Kim Jong-un before he has a chance to press the proverbial button. Arms-control expert Jeffrey Lewis has warned that the implication of these exercises aren\u2019 t lost on Pyongyang: Kim knows \u201che has to go first, if he is to go at all.\u201d
Just because savvy news consumers in the United States are comfortable assuming that Trump is merely talking trash doesn\u2019 t mean that North Korea is. In April, the president suggested that the day Beijing\u2019s efforts to rein in Pyongyang failed would be the day that America took action against Kim Jong-un\u2019s regime.
\u201cWell if China is not going to solve North Korea, we will. That is all I am telling you, \u201d Trump told the Financial Times.
The fact that the American president is an emotionally volatile reality star \u2014 who publishes his foreign-policy musings directly to the internet \u2014 has always been dangerous. In the context of a military standoff with a nuclear-weapons state, it may prove fatally so.<\/p>\n

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