John Brennan, the former head of the C.I.A., estimates the chance of a war with North Korea at 20 to 25 percent.
Joel S. Wit, a Korea expert at Johns Hopkins University, puts it at 40 percent.
Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, says the odds may be somewhere around 50/50.
.. Almost no expert believes that sanctions will force Kim Jong-un to give up his nuclear weapons or halt his missile program. That puts us on a collision course, for North Korea seems determined to develop a clear capacity to target the U.S. with nuclear weapons
.. the White House hints that it would rather have a war than allow the North to become a nuclear threat
.. Tammy Duckworth, a former military pilot who is now a Democratic senator from Illinois, says that from what she hears, the chance is greater than 50/50 that the president will order a strike.
.. Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican, has said that Trump told him he’d choose a war with North Korea over allowing it to continue on its course.
.. “There is a military option: to destroy North Korea’s program and North Korea itself,” Graham told the “Today” show, relaying a conversation with Trump. “If thousands die, they’re going to die over there. They’re not going to die here — and he’s told me that to my face.”
Graham said that if North Korea continues to test intercontinental ballistic missiles, a war is “inevitable.”
.. Eerily, on my last visit, North Koreans repeatedly said that a nuclear war with the U.S. was not only survivable but winnable.
The U.S. must now choose among three awful options:
- A “freeze for a freeze” deal, which Secretary of State Rex Tillerson seems to be pursuing;
- Long-term deterrence, just as we have deterred North Korea for decades from using its chemical and biological weapons;
- A conventional war that might escalate into a nuclear exchange.
.. North Korea may also inflame the situation with provocations at any time, such as firing a long-range missile into the sea near Guam, or conducting an atmospheric nuclear test that would send radioactive fallout drifting toward the United States.
Trump’s ‘Never Mind’ DACA Tweet
The president signals his enthusiasm for amnesty. Why would immigration activists give an inch?
I argued during the GOP nomination battle that Trump is a phony on immigration. He camouflages this fact in provocative (and sometimes noxious) rhetoric about Mexicans and a border wall — a wall that would be physically impossible to build as he described it and that Mexico was never going to pay for. (Have you noticed our coming budget battle is over his insistence that American taxpayers foot the bill?) But if you listened carefully, there was always an amnesty subtext. Recall his truly absurd claims that he would round up and deport 11 million people and then bring most of them back with legal status.
Trump wants to be all things to all people: the restrictionist ideal of his rabid base as well as an amnesty enthusiast in the mold of a New York City Democrat.
The DACA sleight of hand proves the point. On the hustings, restrictionist Trump promised to rescind DACA as soon as he took office (and some people actually believed him). Of course, he did not do so . . . because he doesn’t think it should be rescinded; he thinks it should be law. But he wants credit for ending it — for being both against and for it. –
.. If DACA were narrowly drawn, strictly to benefit the immigrants whom Democrats and the GOP establishment portray as the typical DREAMer
.. There are two reasons it is not. First, it is not narrowly drawn; rather, it designed to shoehorn a broader array of illegal aliens into legal status. Second and more significantly, because Democrats (and many pro-amnesty Republicans) are insufficiently sympathetic to the demands of Americans for better security and tighter immigration controls, there must be tradeoffs if the ruling class is to be motivated to negotiate.
.. Art of the deal, huh?
Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s provocative veiled threat to Congress
She repeated: “Again, if they can’t, then they should get out of the way and let somebody else take their job that can actually get something done.”
.. This is a remarkable tone for the White House to be setting on the eve of a number of critical fights and pieces of legislation. We knew President Trump was willing to unleash his Twitter account on GOP congressional leaders, and during one Q&A, he left open the idea that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) might need to be replaced if he can’t deliver. But Sanders’s repeated comments make clear those weren’t just one-offs; this is now the White House’s official strategy and talking point.
.. To recap, the things on Congress’s to-do list are:
- averting a government shutdown,
- passing the first major tax reform since 1986,
- a hurricane relief bill for Harvey (and the possibility of emergency action required for Hurricane Irma in Florida),
- a massive to-be-determined infrastructure bill and now
- comprehensive immigration reform. (Sanders made clear Trump doesn’t want “just a one-piece fix.”) Oh, and don’t forget that Trump wants Congress to
- resurrect health care and get that done, too.
.. Even if this wasn’t a Congress in which failure and gridlock have become the norm, that would be a daunting set of tasks. Trump has now set the bar so high that he’s basically guaranteeing Congress will fail, by his standards.
.. And Sanders so casually adding comprehensive immigration reform to their to-do list Tuesday — and basically giving them six months to complete it before DACA is phased out — was the equivalent of a gut punch to congressional leaders, given years and years of failure on that issue. Having the White House pile that on is almost cruel.
.. The problem, as I noted earlier Tuesday, is that Trump has shown little appetite for providing that leadership. He has demonstrated that he much prefers to leave things to Congress and blame them when they fail. Even more troublingly for GOP leaders, Trump doesn’t just get out of the way; he is forever changing his positions and giving Congress conflicting signals, leaving leaders without the opportunity to apply presidential pressure on members.
.. Trump’s only priority seems to be passing something, but even on that front, his efforts are usually counterproductive. Even in urging large-scale action on immigration, the White House on Tuesday declined to say specifically what it wanted from a bill or whether Trump would sign a straight replacement of just DACA.
.. Tuesday’s example was the latest indication of a looming showdown and irreconcilable, inherent problems between Congress and the White House.
This will get worse before it gets better.
North Korean Nuclear Test Draws U.S. Warning of ‘Massive Military Response’
The underground blast was by far North Korea’s most powerful ever. Though it was far from clear that the North had set off a hydrogen bomb, as it claimed, the explosion caused tremors that were felt in South Korea and China. Experts estimated that the blast was four to sixteen times more powerful than any the North had set off before, with far more destructive power than the bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.
.. Mr. Trump hinted at one extreme option: In a Twitter post just before he met his generals, he said that “the United States is considering, in addition to other options, stopping all trade with any country doing business with North Korea.’’
.. Taken literally, such a policy would be tantamount to demanding a stoppage of any Chinese oil to North Korea, essentially an attempt to freeze out the country this winter and bring whatever industry it has to a halt.
.. The Chinese would almost certainly balk; they have never been willing to take steps that might lead to the collapse of the North Korean regime, no matter how dangerous its behavior, for fear that South Korean and American troops would occupy the country and move directly to the Chinese border.
.. Beyond that, the economic disruption of ending all trade with China would be so huge inside the United States that Mr. Trump’s aides declined on Sunday to discuss the implications.
.. “We are not looking to the total annihilation of a country, namely North Korea,” he said. “But as I said, we have many options to do so.”
.. The North has shown no interest in engaging with the United States unless the Americans end their military presence in the South.
.. the North Korean leader has tried to portray his nuclear program as unstoppable and nonnegotiable
.. “North Korea is a rogue nation which has become a great threat and embarrassment to China, which is trying to help but with little success,” he said. “South Korea is finding, as I have told them, that their talk of appeasement with North Korea will not work, they only understand one thing!”
.. Mr. Trump’s undisguised swipe at the South for “appeasement” was certain to exacerbate fears that the United States might put it in danger. And it came only a day after Mr. Trump threatened a new rift in relations with suggestions that the United States might withdraw from a trade deal with South Korea — one that was intended to bolster the alliance.
.. The test’s timing was a major embarrassment for President Xi Jinping of China, who on Sunday was hosting a summit meeting of the so-called BRICS countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
.. the test seemed intended to jolt Mr. Xi and convince him that he needed to persuade the United States to talk to North Korea.
.. The timing of the test on Sunday was almost certainly no coincidence: It came during the American Labor Day weekend, and the anniversary of the founding of the North Korean government is next Saturday.
In the coming days, the government is expected to organize huge rallies to celebrate the bomb test and Mr. Kim’s leadership.
.. “Pyongyang has a playbook of strategic provocations, throws off its adversaries through graduated escalation, and seeks maximum political impact by conducting weapons tests on major holidays,”
.. experts have said that the North may have tested a “boosted” atomic bomb that used tritium,