The stakes of these feuds are most readily calculated in very immediate terms—What does this mean for Trump’s legislative agenda?—or very abstract ones—Is Trump destroying the American presidency? The public and press are so accustomed to such outbreaks that we can easily read past the surface and search for the underlying subtexts and palace intrigue. On face, however, the splits with Tillerson and Corker both center around the same material question of whether the United States will start a shooting war, most likely with North Korea.

After a Twitter volley over the weekend, Corker told the Times that he worried Trump didn’t understand the stakes of his statements on foreign-policy questions, viewing it as a “reality show of some kind.”

“He doesn’t realize that, you know, that we could be heading towards World War III with the kinds of comments that he’s making,” said Corker, who is the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and close to Tillerson, and therefore particularly well-placed to analyze Trump’s foreign-policy choices.

There are two obvious things Corker could be talking about (and one hopes no less-obvious ones): North Korea and Iran. Both of them also intersect with Trump’s differences with Tillerson, too.

In the immediate term, Trump is reportedly on the verge of de-certifying the deal that Barack Obama struck to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons. The president would likely then punt that matter to Congress, leaving it to decide whether or not the deal remains in place. Trump has long been bluntly critical of the Iran deal, but many people around him are not, including Defense Secretary James Mattis and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, both of whom are generally Iran hawks but supportive of the nuclear agreement. So is Corker, who struck a deal with Democratic Senator Ben Cardin in 2015 that allowed the agreement to go forward. On Sunday, Trump said Corker was “largely responsible for the horrendous Iran Deal!”

The case for the Iran deal, even among some of those who were critical of it at the time, comes down to a couple major points. One is that a non-proliferating Iran, even under less-than-ideal terms, is better than a proliferating Iran, especially because it might encourage other regional powers (notably the Gulf states) to develop their own nuclear programs, and could weaken American muscle in the Middle East. Another is that pulling out of the deal would create fractures with allies who continue to back it; withdrawing would destroy American credibility, and contra Trump there is little chance of renegotiating at better terms. Both of those reasons make war—something that could spiral into a world war—more likely, as Ilan Goldenberg and Mara Karlin write for The Atlantic Monday.

The more apparently urgent venue for World War III to break out is, of course, on the Korean peninsula. Tillerson reportedly called Trump a moron in July, after a disastrous Trump speech to the Boy Scouts of America (an organization Tillerson previously led), but the current tiff between the men began October 1, with these tweets, three days before the “moron” story broke”

...Save your energy Rex, we'll do what has to be done! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 1, 2017

Trump referred to comments Tillerson made September 30, saying that the U.S. had some direct lines of communication with the North Korean regime, short of actually being in negotiations. Trump has repeatedly undercut Tillerson, publicly contradicting his secretary of state. (He says he has not.) The president’s apologists present this as some sort of good-cop, bad-cop routine, but that shtick doesn’t work when Trump is Tillerson’s boss and when he has repeatedly differed from Tillerson around the world; instead, it imparts the lesson that Tillerson need not and in fact should not be taken seriously, because he does not speak for Trump.