Summary: President Trump’s “fire and fury” comments about North Korea set off the predictable hyperbole among his blindly furious foes on the cable shows, few of whom seem to grasp that the North Korea crisis has been growing since almost the Armistice was signed and accelerating since Bill Clinton’s much-celebrated then and understood as disastrous today deal of 1994. Neither George W. Bush’s nor Barack Obama’s various diplomatic overtures yielded much besides more tests, more time, and now more nukes and missiles. Blunt—indeed provocative—talk may or may not work but it can’t be said that Trump was upsetting a successful strategy put in motion by his predecessors. The villain on the Korean peninsula is Kim Jung Un. American media in love with hating Donald Trump can continue in their patterns, but suggesting Trump is somehow the source of the problem in Pyongyang is a poker tell of incredible ignorance about the region, and perhaps a fundamental inability to report the news.
