There is some percentage of threats, both military and non-military, that Trump has in fact realized. He struck Syria with cruise missiles in April following a chemical-weapons attack on civilians, after declaring that “these heinous actions by the Assad regime cannot be tolerated.” He withdrew from the Paris Climate Accords after having promised to “cancel” it during his presidential campaign.

On many other domestic and foreign issues, however, the pattern has been hyperbole followed quickly by concessions. He vowed to label China a currency manipulator and then backed off. He threatened to withdraw from NAFTA and then stayed in, pledging to renegotiate it instead. North Korea by itself has illustrated this pattern repeatedly. Trump insisted on Twitter in January that North Korea getting the ability to fit a nuclear warhead onto an ICBM “won’t happen!” The Defense Intelligence Agency now reportedly believes that it has. Last week Trump insisted that Kim Jong Un is “not going to go around threatening Guam and he’s not going to threaten the United States and he’s not going to threaten Japan and he’s not going to threaten South Korea.“ He is, and he has.

The point is that what Trump says bears little relationship to the course he intends to pursue. When he invokes the “military option” against North Korea or Venezuela or anywhere else, it could well mean he intends to use it; it could mean just the opposite. It could mean his advisers are undertaking sober analysis of all the various tools available for the United States to shape international events in its interests, of which the military is one; it could mean his advisers had no idea what he was going to say or tweet. (McMaster, who sought to calm talk of war with North Korea on Sunday, also dismissed the possibility of military intervention in Venezuela a little over a week ago.)

But this isn’t comforting at all. Kim Jong Un’s intentions are famously hard to discern, but Americans deserve to be able to understand clearly what their own president intends when it comes to the possibility of a catastrophic, and possibly nuclear, war. Some of the sharpest observers of the crisis have come away with nearly opposite conclusions. Former Defense Secretary William Perry, who led the Pentagon during one of the first North Korean nuclear crises of the 1990s, told The New York Times’s Michael Barbaro on Thursday that he worried the United States was stumbling into war. Bowden, who wrote The Atlantic’s recent cover story on dealing with North Korea, was more reassuring on the Atlantic Radio podcast: “Logic dictates against all-out conflict,” not least because the North Koreans know the country wouldn’t survive such a war and “it’s a fair bet that they wouldn’t push things to that limit.”

If American analysts and former government officials, with all their access to U.S. decision-makers and knowledge of how U.S. policymaking works, can’t clearly discern what America will do, how much of a chance does the Kim regime have when it has barely any contact with the U.S. at all? Many analysts believe that Kim has no interest in endangering his regime by launching a suicidal first strike on the U.S. or its allies—his overriding goal being to preserve his own power—but that the threat of a U.S. preemptive strike or regime change is the one thing that would make him contemplate taking the risk. So what happens if Kim guesses U.S. intentions wrong?