“There is a chance that we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea. Absolutely,” he told Reuters; there is no mention of the reporter interviewing the president chasing a handful of Tums with a Xanax after hearing this news, I’d like to think that happened in private. The president followed that alarming statement by saying that the military option is still on the table, but ideally “We’d love to solve things diplomatically but it’s very difficult.”
In an attempt to solve the matter in North Korea without escalating tensions any further, Trump has been relying heavily on China’s President Xi Jinping, a man with whom he enjoyed dessert in Mar-a-lago while 59 missiles struck a Syrian airbase on his command earlier this month. “I believe he is trying very hard. He certainly doesn’t want to see turmoil and death. He doesn’t want to see it. He is a good man. He is a very good man and I got to know him very well,” he said —an opinion that is as vague as you’d expect from someone with very little understanding of the nuances of dealing with North Korea or anything else in his job description.
According to U.S. officials, military action is still an option but that’s not the road they’re trying to take: interesting, considering the “armada” Trump claimed was headed towards North Korea that actually wasn’t, maybe.
On Friday, another man who is unqualified for his job, U.S. Secretary Rex Tillerson is set to chair a special meeting of the United Nations Security Council specifically to address the threat of a nuclear North Korea. The Washington Post reports that in an interview airing Friday with NPR, Tillerson said that the administration is willing to bargain directly with North Korea, though he wasn’t really clear about what he meant. Consider the strange, incomprehensible word salad, below:
“But North Korea has to decide they’re ready to talk to us about the right agenda, and the right agenda is not simply stopping where they are for a few more months or a few more years and then resuming things. That’s been the agenda for the last 20 years.”
Wonderful. There’s also this, from the Post.
A North Korean propaganda outlet released a video clip on Thursday showing a simulated attack on the White House and declaring that “the enemy to be destroyed is in our sights.”
The session on Friday at the U.N. Security Council is meant to be a warning to North Korea that the United States isn’t the only country that thinks the nuclear situation there has reached a “crisis point,” something that I’m sure will be very well-received.
