In a normal world, every politician in Washington would be alarmed if the U.S. president threatened to use nuclear weapons to destroy another nation, as President Donald Trump did on Tuesday. “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States,” he said during a photo op at his Trump National Golf Club in New Jersey. “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” To someone who had just awoken from a years-long coma, his remarks would have suggested that the world was on the brink of nuclear war. Indeed, historians in search of a rhetorical precedent had to go all the way back to President Harry Truman’s 1945 announcement of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima.



But everyone in Washington is all too familiar now with Trump’s flatulent mouth. Thus, most powerful figures, including members of Trump’s own party and administration, discounted his words as mere hyperbole. “Don’t read too much into it,” a White House source told Politico reporter Josh Dawsey. Senator John McCain criticized Trump’s words, but added, “I don’t pay much attention anymore to what the president says because there’s no point in it. It’s not terrible what he said, but it’s kind of the classic Trump in that he overstates things.” The unanswered question is whether this habit of overstating things is not itself a massive problem.

The dilemma here is composed of two separate problems. One is the stalemate on the Korean Peninsula, which dates to the end of war there in 1953, but is now made more tense by North Korea’s increasing nuclear capabilities. The other is Trump himself, an uninformed and undisciplined oaf who likes to shoot from the hip. The first problem, the Korean standoff, is worrisome but also fundamentally stable; a solution is preferable, but not urgent. The second problem, the current American president, could trigger an actual war—and though the solution is urgent, no obvious one exists.

There’s a reason why the stand-off on the Korean Peninsula has lasted for nearly seven decades. It’s like the Cold War in miniature, where the furious rhetoric between opposing parties belies their fundamental commitment to the status quo. North and South Korea claim they want unification, but to judge by their actions over many decades, they think any shift from their uneasy peace would cause more trouble than it’s worth. The communist elites in North Korea have enough trouble maintaining power without an expanded territory, and the costs and complications of unification is one of the most divisive issues in South Korean politics. The impasse also works in the interests of outside powers. For China, an armed North Korea is a way to keep regional rivals South Korea and Japan, as well as the U.S., on their toes. For America, the threat of North Korea is the cement holding together its alliance in the region.

By this reading, dictator Kim Jong-un and the rest of the Korean elite are fundamentally rational, albeit cruel. They’re committed to maintaining absolute power, but not suicidal. They use nuclear brinksmanship to maintain their grip on society, the fear of outside attack helping to fuel nationalism and suppress dissent. As with the Cold War, the main danger is that the nations blunder into nuclear war through miscommunication, where one party misinterprets ritualistic brinksmanship as a genuine threat. This almost happened on several occasions in the Cold War, notably in the Cuban Missile Crisis.