OPINION | Did A President Trump’s tweet leave the U. S. only a choice between the unthinkable and the unacceptable?
American policy options for dealing with North Korea’s nuclear weapons may have just gotten a lot scarier.
A tweet by President Donald Trump Donald Trump Alec Baldwin channels Trump in George Washington impersonation Vicente Fox: Trump’s ‘hot-headed’ personality could lead to war Trump can’ t just tweet us out of problems with North Korea MORE is the reason.
Trump got off to a good start in addressing an existential threat. He recognized that China, by far North Korea’s largest trading partner, is the key to pressuring North Korea to either give up its nuclear and ballistic missile programs or, more realistically, agree to some combination of a scale back and a freeze.
ADVERTISEMENT At his Mar-a-Lago meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in early April, Trump offered better trade terms in exchange for China sharply reducing its exports to North Korea.
Then came the tweet. Last week, following the death of Otto Warmbier, the American college student who had been jailed in North Korea and returned to the U. S. in a coma, Trump tweeted:
In that one tweet, Trump precipitously declared that his own policy was a failure – after only a little over ten weeks — and absolved China of further responsibility for rolling back the North Korean nuclear and missile programs. Asked to explain the tweet, administration officials veered between bafflement and suggesting that the tweet should not be taken seriously.
But to Xi, who was always reluctant to really pressure North Korea, the tweet must have been heaven-sent because Xi can claim that China did its best and, as to the North Korean nuclear threat to the U. S., well, good luck with that.
Absent meaningful Chinese sanctions, the policy choice is between the unthinkable and the unacceptable. The unthinkable option is a pre-emptive strike on North Korean nuclear and missile installations.
