Trump Tweets Threats to Iran, as he did to North Korea

Still, it would be dangerous to conclude from this episode that Trump was still bluffed. What Trump had for him, was that his rhetoric was so everywhere, and his actions on the international scene so unconventional, that no one could ever be certain that his bluster was empty, even though it was probably the case. With Trump, it seemed like nothing was true. And everything was possible.

"Bluff is really just the player's style of negotiation: make a maximalist demand, frame the debate around that, and go from there, improvise all the way," Axios reported last April . "A source close to Trump tells us …" Trump has persevered enough in his threats that it's impossible to determine what he really thinks. "

In the case of North Korea, this may have worked ways.Yun Sun, Chinese expert at the Stimson Center, acknowledged Trump's repeated military threats last summer and the Last fall by persuading China to sign tough sanctions against North Korea and put pressure on the North to negotiate its nuclear weapons program. "The Chinese were sincerely convinced that the war was imminent" and determined to avoid it, she told me.Trump "extracted more cooperation from China on North Korea than probably all the previous US presidents and administrations combined." Chung In Moon, foreign policy advisor of the 39, the current South Korean President, and Chun Yung Woo, a former South Korean national The security advisor told me in Seoul that speculation about US military action probably played a role, albeit lim in the fact that Kim Jong Un has started nuclear talks this spring rather than continuing to advance his nuclear program. "I do not think [Kim] saw, for example, a 50 percent chance of military action," Chun said. "But even if there is a 10% chance of a military strike, he has good reason to be scared."

But the president's bluffs and his tightrope politics also put the president in danger. United States and risk a catastrophic conflict on the Korean peninsula. When war threats are ambiguous and change shape, so are triggers. If Kim Jong Un had interpreted Trump's meteoric rise as a license to test a living nuclear weapon on the Pacific, the US military could have put itself into action, plunging the two weapons-armed states into action. nuclear weapons in hostilities. And even if you badume that it is Trump's threats that brought Kim to the negotiating table – a big if-Trump does not have much to show for the moment. The North Korean leader has reduced the likelihood of war by engaging in international diplomacy without making major concessions on his nuclear program.

The vague quality of Trump's words aside, her administration as a whole was relatively clear on what she considered unacceptable in the case of North Korea (the North developing long-range nuclear weapons). which could reliably reach the United States) and what was the ultimate goal of its pressure (denuclearization). With Iran, the administration has not approached anything of this level of clarity. "President Trump has said that if Iran did anything negative, it would pay a price as few countries have already paid for it," said the national security advisor. John Bolton in the aftermath of Trump's offensive. Does "anything to the negative" mean anything like what triggered Trump's tweet on Sunday: did the Iranian president warn that a war between the United States and the United Iran would be mbadive? Does this mean that Iran and its ally Hezbollah are intensifying their conflict simmering with Israel? Or does Iran revive its nuclear weapons program? Or anything inside what State Secretary Mike Pompeo has called, when publishing a list of 12 points on the Islamic Republic, "the magnitude of slanderous behavior of l & # 39; Iran "?