One of the underplayed stories of the Trump administration is the gross mishandling of the situation with North Korea, where the prospect for a deadly confrontation threatening millions of lives on both sides of the border has sharply escalated. Trump has mocked past efforts to manage the situation and used Twitter to stoke a bizarre and unbecoming personal feud with North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un that is filled with deadly serious threats and petty name-calling. In August, Trump threatened North Korea with “fire and fury” in an apparent reference to a nuclear strike on the peninsula (bold added below).
"North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States," the president warned, responding to a reporter's question at his Bedminster Golf Club, where Trump has spent the last several days. "They will be met with fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before."
Just last night former CIA Director John Brennan assessed the prospect of war at around 20 - 25%.
"I think the prospects of military conflict in the Korean peninsula are greater than they have been in several decades," he said during a Q-and-A session at Fordham University in New York Wednesday evening. "I don't think it's likely or probable, but if it's a 1-in-4 or 1-in-5 chance, that's too high."
Asked whether that was how he'd rate the chances, Brennan responded, "Yeah, I guess I would." The public back-and-forth between Kim Jong Un and Mr. Trump is "not the way to de-escalate," he said, adding that he hoped Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is, as Tillerson has said, pursuing a diplomatic solution, perhaps through back channels in a way that could enable both leaders to "save face."
Trump’s alarming threats appear to have some basis in internal White House discussions about how to manage the situation, as the first story goes on to relate.
"General Kelly and others on the NSC team were well aware of the tone of" the president's statement before it was delivered," White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Wednesday, stating that both "the tone and strength of the message were discussed beforehand."
It would be catastrophically unwise to dismiss the potential for horrific developments. Just this morning, there were chilling messages from professional East Asia watchers on Twitter. The mini-episode that alarmed me anew began with a now-deleted Tweet from Michael Swaine.
Bonnie Glaser spoke up to say she was in the same meeting and this was a mischaracterization.
This isn’t really a direct refutation that the senior Hill source believes Trump will order a strike. It actually confirms that serious consideration is being given to that option and obscures it in an undecided cloud of “many military options.”
Note that Swaine went on to retract his Tweet about the limited strike and blame the misunderstanding on information flying quickly around DC.
I wasn’t reassured by this resolution at all. What information is flying around? What military options are under consideration when even Steve Bannon acknowledges “There’s no military solution, forget it." How do we apparently have so much in the works preparing for strikes with public and international policy dialogue in a shambles of insult and hyperbolic threat? How does the former CIA Director get so worried he warns of 25% chance of war? What do senior members of Congress know about our strategy and why do their conversations on background trigger highly experienced East Asia watchers to conclude the Hill sources think we are headed for war?
I now also see stories that Brennan is warning Trump aides must talk him out of war.
Speaking on NBC's "TODAY" show, Brennan said that while Trump was "trying to demonstrate he’s tough" with hostile rhetoric aimed at North Korea, he lacks experience with "international brinkmanship," and that could put top officials — like Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Chief of Staff John Kelly and Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — in the position of having to talk the commander in chief out of military conflict.
It’s clear to me we need to sound the alarm about the extraordinarily dangerous path this administration is on. This administration has a record of mismanaging all manner of important matters, but we must not let a tragic war be launched in our name.