And while there are parallels between Trump’s recent bluster and the bombastic rhetoric the North Koreans favor, this latest threat to Guam violates one of Trump’s stated rules of threatening. As he said during the campaign regarding how he would defeat the Islamic State: “I don’t want to broadcast to the enemy exactly what my plan is.” Indeed, at times his administration has seemed to broadcast completely different kinds of plans with regard to North Korea—from regime change to regime acceptance to seeking negotiations to being done talking to “fire and fury.”

What those comments have tended not to be is concrete and specific. In his most recent statements on the matter, Trump offered no plan of action for the U.S., choosing instead to proclaim via Twitter that the American nuclear arsenal is “far stronger and more powerful than ever before” and that “hopefully we will never have to use this power.” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, for his part, offered that North Korea does not pose an imminent threat to the U.S. and that Americans “should sleep well at night.” (In fact, he landed in Guam on Wednesday on his way back to the U.S. from Malaysia for a prescheduled refueling stop, not long after North Korea first threatened the island.) Later the same day, Defense Secretary James Mattis issued his own threat, warning Pyongyang that any further provocation would “be grossly overmatched by ours and would lose any arms race or conflict it initiates.”

The Trump administration has enacted specific policies—including, most recently, a new round of UN sanctions on North Korea—under the broad strategy of what the administration calls “maximum pressure and engagement,” so some aspects of the U.S. plan are now a reality and a matter of public record. The Atlantic has published some of the clearest explanations of how a still-hypothetical U.S. attack on North Korea might unfold, from Mark Bowden and Uri Friedman. And it’s fair to speculate that the Trump administration wants to cultivate some degree of uncertainty about precisely where, when, and whether the U.S. might strike. The element of surprise is a basic principle of warfare going back to Sun Tzu and before.

Which makes the latest North Korean threat even stranger than the vows of years past to turn Seoul into a “sea of fire” or nuke the White House. The flight trajectories cited indicate, at the very least, that the state news agency is projecting confidence about its missiles’ precision; the clarity of the timing described is a clear intent to signal they’re just about ready; the end point in Guam’s waters, rather than Guam itself, is almost a de-escalation from, albeit somewhat consistent with, Tuesday’s threat to make “an enveloping fire at the areas around Guam.” Whatever the intended messages from either side, however, as the rhetoric escalates, they risk being misheard or misunderstood—with incredibly dangerous consequences.