North Korea missile test: How Trump's unpredictability changes the game

Given that North Korea can already produce a nuclear weapon, it is vital to keep it from developing an intercontinental ballistic missile. On this measure, the rest of the world has so far failed – and that was made clearer than ever on July 4 2017, when Pyongyang claimed to have successfully tested an intercontinental ballistic missile for the first time.

If reports of the missile’s performance are accurate, Kim Jong-un may soon have the ability to hit US territory for the first time. Donald Trump previously said this will never be allowed – and, sure enough, the US and South Korea responded to the test with a missile drill of their own in the Sea of Japan.

Trump has been banging this drum on and off since his presidency began – albeit very inconsistently. Heralding the end of Barack Obama’s policy of “strategic patience”, he has ostensibly hardened the US’s stance on North Korea, saying that there is chance of a “major, major conflict” if the country does not curb its nuclear ambitions.

In April 2017, pressed to say whether another nuclear test would trigger military action from the US, Trump said “we’ll see”. But in the same interview, Trump has gone on the record saying he would be “honored” to meet the North Korean president, Kim Jong-un, praising his counterpart as a “pretty smart cookie” and apparently empathising with him, noting that it must have been “hard” for Kim to take the reins at such a young age.

Observers saw this as yet another sign of Trump’s ineptitude and incoherence. But looked at another way, his apparently garbled messages could have value as a sort of extreme carrot-and-stick methodology, simultaneously threatening devastating military action and offering the ultimate diplomatic prize of a meeting with the US president himself.

This approach has so far yielded mixed results.
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