How Trump Made the Nearly Impossible North Korea Problem Even Worse

After years of mocking Barack Obama for passivity in the face of North Korea’s growing nuclear-weapons stockpile, Trump confronts the same grim set of choices. As seemingly every article on the July 4 missile test has stressed, those choices are “few and risky” and have been for years. Yet, after six months of Trump’s presidency, they are grimmer than ever before. His degradation of language, his destruction of American diplomacy, his disdain for alliances: Trump’s foreign policy has wrecked the very tools needed to navigate a crisis that would be frightening even under the stewardship of the most judicious commander-in-chief

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