Kim Jong Un isnt the first tyrant to play Trump, and he wont be the last
Like a lot of people before him, Kim Jong Un has discovered that it is easy to bait Donald Trump. Last week the North Korean dictator delivered a speech promising to test-launch an intercontinental ballistic missile, a rocket that could give his regime the means to threaten the U.S. homeland with a nuclear strike.
It took just hours for Trump to respond. “North Korea just stated that it is in the final stages of developing a nuclear weapon capable of reaching parts of the U.S,” he tweeted. “It won’t happen!”
In fact, if Kim’s promised launch does not proceed, it will be because the regime still lacks a functional ICBM, not because Trump is able to stop it. As the intelligence community might have informed him were he taking briefings, there was no urgent need to draw a red line: Test or no test, outside experts say that it will be years before the North will be ready to deploy such a weapon. Kim’s real aim in delivering the speech was to command the attention of the incoming American president and goad him into publicly recognizing and addressing the 33-year-old tyrant. Mission accomplished.
Kim, of course, is not the only foreign leader to try pushing his way into the president-elect’s Twitter feed. The testing of a new U.S. president by both adversaries and allies is a well-established phenomenon. What’s different about the Trump transition is the tactics some have adopted. Rather than dispatch delegations or lobby advisers, foreign governments, having taken the new man’s narcissistic measure, are doing their best to engage him personally, through tweets and other public statements.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/kim-jong-un-isnt-the-first-tyrant-to-play-trump-and-he-wont-be-the-last/2017/01/08/f70272ee-d370-11e6-945a-76f69a399dd5_story.html?utm_term=.af0c438c1619&wpisrc=nl_rainbow&wpmm=1
