In a White House meeting just weeks before Donald Trump’s inauguration, then-President Barack Obama warned the president-elect that the North Korean nuclear threat would be the thorniest national security challenge he would inherit. Kim Jong Un then welcomed Trump to office with nearly two dozen ballistic missile tests in 2017 alone, showing off increasingly sophisticated capabilities with each, including solid-fuel engines and a pair of intercontinental ballistic missiles. So Trump moved with gusto to abandon the more cautious and conventional but generally futile approaches of his predecessors. His administration tried “maximum pressure,” pairing crippling U.N. sanctions with an all-out effort to communicate that it was serious about going to war to end the North’s nuclear threat. It tried diplomacy by personal rapport, breaking precedent with a trio of historic summits between Trump and Kim. Then it tried basically ignoring the North for a couple of years.
Read Full Article »
