NATIONAL SECURITY/NORTH KOREA/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “When folks here in Washington end a summer filled with White House hijinks and an epic but inconclusive health-care debate, they will look up and discover something unsettling: The world has become a more dangerous place while everybody has been distracted.
That’s most obviously true in North Korea, where its rogue weapons program has leapt so far forward that the nation now has a missile with the range to reach much of the U.S. Pyongyang’s capabilities are advancing so quickly that the Defense Intelligence Agency has had to ratchet forward, to as early as next year, its estimate of when it will have an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.
There is widespread expectation the North Koreans may conduct another missile test in a matter of days, and, perhaps not long down the road, another underground test of a nuclear device.
Meanwhile, American relations with China, the country most able to cooperate in slowing down Pyongyang, are deteriorating amid presidential recriminations—delivered via Twitter—about Beijing’s behavior.”
-Gerald F. Seib, “As Washington Churns, the World Grows More Dangerous,” The Wall Street Journal online, July 31, 2017 10:43am