“The world has received North Korea’s latest message loud and clear: this regime has signaled its contempt for its neighbors, for all members of the United Nations, and for minimum standards of acceptable international behavior,” it read. In conclusion: “All options are on the table.”

It was less than two weeks ago that President Trump offered a slightly different assessment of the behavior of North Korea’s leader. Then, Kim Jong Un had made a “wise and well-reasoned decision” not to fire a missile at Guam. That soothing declaration, of course, followed a rapid escalation of tensions at the end of which Trump threatened to pick a very particular option up from that table.

North Korea, he warned, faced “fire and fury” at the hands of the United States, should things go south (so to speak).

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Before that, Trump was celebrating an overwhelming success in the battle against North Korea: A vote at the United Nations Security Council to impose new sanctions on the country. The president of South Korea was “very happy and impressed” with the vote that would result in “very big financial impact,” though the “fake news media” would not talk about its importance (Here’s The Washington Post’s story.)

The sanctions followed another low, when Trump gave up on China carrying the water dealing with the rogue nation.

That followed Trump’s attempts to cajole the world’s most populous nation into action, by suggesting that North Korea was disrespecting the country or by dumping the whole thing in China’s lap.

And that followed a bit of empathy for Kim expressed in an interview with Reuters in April.

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“He’s 27 years old. His father dies, took over a regime. So say what you want but that is not easy, especially at that age,” Trump said. “I’m not giving him credit or not giving him credit, I’m just saying that’s a very hard thing to do.”

This up and down, ebb and flow is all since Jan. 20. Before his inauguration, Trump’s rhetoric on North Korea took two tracks: The country was China’s problem, but, despite that, he wouldn’t allow North Korea to continue to develop nuclear weapons.

The throughline was that he was a great negotiator and he would persuade China to act.

“President Obama watches helplessly as North Korea increases its aggression and expands further and further with its nuclear reach,” Trump said in April 2016. “Our president has allowed China to continue its economic assault on American jobs and wealth, refusing to enforce trade deals and apply leverage on China necessary to rein in North Korea. We have the leverage. We have the power over China, economic power, and people don’t understand it.”

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That argument predates his candidacy. Four years ago, he popped up on “Fox and Friends” to make that case. It was the extent of his strategy on entering the White House. And it quickly became obvious that he couldn’t negotiate his way to a solution on a decades-old intractable conflict.

Trump didn’t talk about North Korea very much on the campaign trail, except as a way to bash Hillary Clinton. (And, secondarily, to complain that South Korea wasn’t paying for our aid in its protection.) His focus was on disparaging the blue line strategy: The policy of prior administrations of maintaining pressure on North Korea. During the vice presidential debate, Trump’s team put out a news release faulting Clinton for allowing North Korea to ramp up its missile program during her tenure — a ramping up which, of course, has continued since he became president.

As Mark Bowden wrote at the Atlantic last month, there aren’t good options when it comes to dealing with North Korea, and Trump’s up-and-down style doesn’t seem to have been any more effective so far than the slow-and-steady approach his predecessors employed — to not much effect.

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It is, however, very much in keeping with Trump’s presidency in general. Trump has no lukewarm temperature; nearly everything is an extreme in one direction or the other.

Trump has received (and retweeted) praise for his unpredictability on foreign affairs, but that’s a different phenomenon. On North Korea, Trump’s been quite predictable, loudly announcing that he has a stick or, as needed, just how delicious his carrots happen to be.