On Thursday the #United States Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had opened a door to the #North Korean regime to negotiate when President Trump sidestepped in with the sort of martial-sounding threats against the North that the Oval Office has tried to avoid until now.
Putting his foot in it, again
On the 100th day in his office, #Trump mouthed off that America could in fact end up having a “major conflict with North Korea,” as he expressively told Reuters during his 100 day celebrations. This is not the sort of diplomacy that one would expect of an American president; it is impulsive, off record and also grossly indiscreet.
Seen in the most positive way, this was Trump trying to pressure the #North Korean regime into freezing its nuclear missile tests, those experiments that have amped up in the past few years and months and caused the White House no end in speculation and anxiety about the country's aims.
If the #North Korean regime did freeze its steps, this would be seen as the first step toward embarking once again on the sort of negotiations that Rex Tillerson, the clearly hampered Secretary of State, had referred to that morning. Other analysts and political pundits, however, have speculated that perhaps Trump was indulging in the sort of 'madman theory' that can circulate in the play book of powerful men, the idea that a mad president is so dangerous that he can get his way during global diplomatic negotiations by freaking the enemy out.
The madmen playbook
The idea if the "madman president" was what President Trump and many of his right-hand aides apparently so love about President Richard Nixon's tenure as president. Nixon persuaded the anarchic Ho Chi Minh, a troublesome North Vietnamese leader, that he could in fact be so unhinged that he may indeed drop “the bomb” if they didn’t in fact resolve a way to conclude and end the horrifying Vietnam War.
This, of course is one theory. The most likely justification about his dramatic diplomacy is that President Trump, who has until this week mostly circumvented the bait-and-switch that the North Korean regime produces with it’s alarming decries of war and violence, simply gave in to his old behavior trait: trying to sound as tough as the enemy.
This is an issue however in that it doesn’t align with the message that the Oval Office has been proclaiming in the past week, and that message has been that no pre-emptive strikes have been premeditated or strategized against the North Korean country, and that diplomacy –talking and negotiating – is the preferred method of the administration.
The president's aides have routinely referenced an “integrated strategy” of escalating military and financial compression to make the regime engage in diplomatic talks with the United States. The overall objective of this sort of method is to bring the leader #Kim Jong-Un to his senses, and not to his knees, as Harry Harris Jnr told the New York Times on Friday.
Sure, the insecure leader of #North Korea is a little dictator that is used to getting his way, but when faced with Trump's childish outcries and incursion into war mongering talk it's not going to be an easy ride with these two severe personalities helming two of the world's most provocative countries.
#Rex Tillerson seems to be on the same page. He told NPR in a radio interview that
the US don’t want to find a complete collapse of the North Korean regime and they don’t want the peninsula in any way reunified quickly. "We seek a denuclearized Korean Peninsula.” He also spoke of the possibility of the United States having direct talks with the embattled regime.