The Other Terrifying Lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis

If you add two cliches together, can the sum be something more than a cliche? Could it actually be alarmingly insightful? In this case, the first cliche is another Donald Trump tweet—Tuesday’s double entendre about his “Nuclear Button” being “much bigger & more powerful” than Kim Jong Un’s. The second cliche is to juxtapose the leaders involved in today’s nuclear standoff between the United States and North Korea with those who managed the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

President Donald Trump's escalated statements against North Korea have revived questions in Washington about the President's authority to approve the use of nuclear weapons. One senator, Democrat Ed Markey of Massachusetts, said Trump's rhetoric "borders on presidential malpractice," and he's calling attention to legislation he drafted that would require congressional approval before any President could sign off on a first-use nuclear strike.

What happens when a North Korean ballistic missile test fails in flight and explodes in a populated area? On April 28, 2017, North Korea launched a single Hwasong-12/KN17 intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) from Pukchang Airfield in South Pyongan Province. That missile failed shortly after launch and crashed in the North Korean city of Tokchon, causing considerable damage to a complex of industrial or agricultural buildings. According to a U.S. government source with knowledge of North Korea’s weapons programs who spoke to The Diplomat, the missile’s first stage engines failed after approximately one minute of powered flight, resulting in catastrophic failure.

Anti-government protests in Iran offer President Donald Trump a new reason to scrap the Iran nuclear deal later this month — a risky move that Trump’s supporters are cheering but that critics warn could play into Tehran’s hands. Trump and his senior officials have offered rhetorical support for the protesters and denounced the government in statements and on Twitter. They are also exploring such further steps as targeted sanctions and warnings to social media companies not to comply with Iranian censorship.

North Korea reopened a border hotline with South Korea on Wednesday, restoring a channel of direct dialogue and signaling a possible thaw in relations between the two Koreas after years of hair-trigger tensions. The return of the telephone hotline at the village of Panmunjom, which straddles the Demilitarized Zone, the world’s most heavily guarded border, came two days after North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, made a rare overture to the South.

The decision to move the American embassy to Jerusalem makes a war in Korea more likely. Not because there is any direct connection between the two, nor because it was a bad idea, recognizing as it did the simple fact that the western part of Jerusalem has been Israel’s capital for over 70 years and will most assuredly remain so. The dangerous bit, rather, was when pundits and diplomats wrung their hands and predicted calamity and (far more predictably) nothing happened. The Arab street grumbled, while Cairo, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi looked the other way, and Donald Trump could be forgiven for thinking that his instincts had been proven entirely correct.