The rabid left-media is conducting a frenzied attack on President Trump this week amid his back-and-forth taunting of North Korea, which they argue is an unneeded escalation of potential nuclear conflict.
But some analysts argue it’s a brilliant game of international strategic poker in which President Trump is forcing North Korea to ante up or fold.
Ultimately, the argument goes, North Korea’s regime has no real desire to be on the receiving end of a U.S. nuclear response.
This puts them in a unique position to continue the saber rattling but with no action to back it up, which means they look pretty much like Obama did after his redline incident.
Further, Trump’s move puts China — which has historically backed its communist neighbor — in a difficult position to denounce N. Korean aggression and back the U.S. if a retaliation is needed.
China hasn’t been in that position since Mao’s revolution. Checkmate.
Here’s more from Breitbart…
The mainstream media are aghast at President Donald Trump’s comments on North Korea as he promises “fire and fury” and warns that American military solutions are “locked and loaded.”
The political elite, and the foreign policy establishment, oscillate between bitter scorn and sheer panic at his tactics. But one does not have to be convinced of Trump’s rhetorical genius to note that he has already re-framed the conflict in a way that is advantageous to the U.S.
First, Trump has radically changed the costs of a potential conflict, for both sides. The dominant paradigm of nuclear face-offs is mutually assured destruction (MAD), which is why the Soviet Union and the U.S. never attacked each other during the Cold War. Most of the discussion about North Korea has followed the same pattern, because of the threat of ICBMs to the U.S. mainland. After Trump threatened to annihilate North Korea, however, Kim Jong-un threatened to attack … Guam. Trump doubled down, indicating that a North Korean attack on Guam would trigger an attack against the regime. That shifted the costs of a war radically in our favor and against theirs.
Second, it is noteworthy that the North Korean threat to Guam did not refer to nuclear weapons, but rather hinted at conventional missile strikes. There is no way to know for sure that the regime would not use nuclear weapons, if indeed the North Koreans can miniaturize them, but a conventional attack is certainly less serious than a nuclear one. In threatening the most violent possible attack, Trump elicited a response that is significantly less threatening.
