Every president has an early foreign policy test, and Donald Trump is no exception. Trump’s test is actually already in progress, and it bears some resemblance to the one faced by a young President John Kennedy. Indeed, Trump’s crisis has best been described as a “slow-motion Cuban missile crisis” – only the crisis-driver is not Fidel Castro, but North Korea’s bizarre despot, Kim Jong Un.
If this crisis is not keeping you up at night, you’re not paying attention.
Let’s see, we have an untested, macho, Twitter-happy U.S. president facing off against the leader of a dynastic North Korean political cult who’s building a long-range nuclear missile that could hit Los Angeles and who – allegedly – just had his half brother, Kim Jong Nam, knocked off by two women who wiped his face with a lethal nerve agent while he was transiting a Malaysian airport.
Hey, what could go wrong?
We need to address this now. Hard to believe, but this hermit kingdom with an economy the size of Dayton, Ohio, “is at a point where it could, by 2020, have a nuclear arsenal half the size of Great Britain’s with missiles capable of striking the U.S. homeland,” said Robert Litwak, from the Wilson Center, one of the premier experts on rogue states.