From the last Morning Jolt of the week:

President Trump Should Visit the DMZ in Korea. President Donald Trump should visit the Demilitarized Zone during his visit to South Korea in early November. Those contending that a presidential visit would be “provocative” are urging the United States to conduct its foreign policy in a defensive crouch, terrified of causing offense to a regime that doesn’t hesitate to suddenly fire missiles over U.S. allies. A presidential visit to the Demilitarized Zone is not only legal and protected under treaties, it is traditional: every president since Reagan has made the visit except George H.W. Bush, who visited when he served as vice president. Earlier this year, Vice President Mike Pence visited. The advocates of scrapping the traditional visit don’t seem to realize what they’re advocating. They want the United States to limit its own activities out of fear of causing offense or angering a regime that A) seems to find everything to be an outrageous provocation, including the continued existence of South Korea, Japan, and the United States and B) demonstrates no concern about its own actions being perceived as “provocative”, including acts usually interpreted as acts of war, such as firing artillery shells into another country’s territory or sinking their naval vessels.

No other regime would seriously object to an American president visiting any location within the territorial borders of an ally. A presidential visit is only provocative because the North Koreans decree it is provocative. This amounts to terms where the Pyongyang regime can do anything it wants without serious consequence and we meekly decide to rule out certain actions to avoid giving offense. Not only will we never have peace under this approach, but it actually increases the likelihood of eventual all-out war. If you keep rewarding aggressive and threatening behavior, you only get more of it. The other objection to a Trump visit is the fear that the president would not be safe there: However, officials in both the U.S. and South Korean governments have raised concerns that Trump could become a target in the heavily fortified area that separates the two Koreas, according to a source familiar with U.S.-South Korea relations. If the North Korean regime really is tempted to try to kill President Trump while he’s visiting South Korea… then the situation is even more dangerous than we thought. A regime that is willing to carry out a surprise attack on the commander-in-chief cannot be trusted to live with nuclear weapons. It is worth remembering that Presidents Bush and Obama visited war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan and also countries with intense terrorist threats like Pakistan, and the U.S. Secret Service rose to the challenge.

William F. Buckey once said, “When the Soviet Union challenged America and our set of loyalties, it did so at gunpoint. It became necessary at a certain point to show them our clenched fist and advise them that we were not going to deal lightly with our primal commitment to preserve those loyalties.” The North Koreans want to negotiate at gunpoint. The point of these visits is to remind them that we have a gun, too.