FOREIGN POLICY/NORTH KOREA/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “President Trump vowed on Wednesday [8-30-17] that he would not talk to Kim Jong-un, cooling off what has become his on-again, off-again cultivation of North Korea’s rogue dictator.
But if Mr. Trump’s tweet, in which he said, ‘talking is not the answer!,’ seemed to reignite tensions with North Korea, it also revealed a paradox in how Asia experts view the crisis. Some fear less that Mr. Trump is going to start a war with Mr. Kim than that he is going to stumble into a risky, unpredictable dialogue with him.
The world’s attention has understandably focused on Mr. Trump’s saber-rattling threats against Mr. Kim — most dramatically, his promise to rain ‘fire and fury’ on North Korea if Mr. Kim fired ballistic missiles at United States territory.
But a meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim, these experts said, could open the door to ratifying North Korea’s nuclear status or scaling back America’s joint military exercises with South Korea. That could sunder American alliances with Japan and South Korea and play to the benefit of China, which has long advocated direct dialogue between Washington and Pyongyang…
While the Pentagon has drawn up options for a military strike on the North, officials concede it would be all but impossible, given the retaliation it would provoke and the calamitous casualties that would result. Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist, reflected that internal consensus when he told The American Prospect, ‘There’s no military solution. Forget it.’
That leaves diplomacy, which Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson and other officials have made clear is still the administration’s preferred course. If North Korea curbs its behavior, Mr. Tillerson said recently, there is a ‘pathway to sometime in the early future having some dialogue.’ “
-Mark Landler, “Trump Says He Will Not Talk to North Korea. Experts Fear He Will.,” The New York Times online, Aug. 30, 2017