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Or rather, called again. All through the last six months, as Kim Jong-Un’s regime made its dash for a nuclear weapon that could reach the continental United States — first successfully testing intercontinental ballistic missiles, then (as reported this week) learning how to fit them with nuclear warheads — various Trump officials have been warning darkly of unspecified but presumably military consequences. It seems only to have accelerated their efforts.

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In part this simply reflects the reality of the situation, which is that there is no easy military solution to the North Korean threat. This is less in the nature of a showdown, after all, than it is a hostage-taking: Unless the U.S. were able to instantly and comprehensively eliminate all of North Korea’s command structure, the first response of Kim’s regime to any pre-emptive strike would avowedly be to nuke South Korea, whose capital, Seoul, is just across the border. If that sounds crazy, well, there’s a certain credibility that comes with being crazy.

Much speculation has surrounded Trump’s mental state, but as a madman he is not in Kim’s league. He is, rather, a fairly conventional bunkum artist — more unprincipled than most, to be sure, indeed seemingly unburdened by any commitment to fact, but ultimately a transparent bluffer. For all his attempt to play the bully, Trump can no more be counted on to deliver on a threat than a promise. Recall how his first bits of bravado, the suggestion that he might recognize Taiwan, or move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, ended: dropped at the first hint of pushback.

So the “credible” part of “credible threat” was lacking, even before Trump attempted it. Perhaps this is a good thing, in a way: who knows how the North Koreans might have reacted had they taken him seriously. Trump likes to boast about his “unpredictability.” But in truth he has made himself something of an open book: as the national security analyst John Schindler has pointed out, those thousands of tweets are a priceless resource for psychological profilers in adversary states.