The New York Times reports: President Trump’s warning on Tuesday that North Korea would experience “fire and fury like the world has never seen” if it continued threatening the United States was a remarkable escalation of military rhetoric with little precedent in the modern era, historians and analysts said.

Mr. Trump’s menacing remarks echoed the tone and cadence of President Harry S. Truman, who, in a 1945 address announcing that the United States had dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, urged the Japanese to surrender, warning that if they did not, “they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.”

It is not clear whether Mr. Trump intended the historical parallel — White House officials did not respond to questions about how much planning went into his brief statement, or what was intended by the alliterative language — but it was a stark break with decades of more measured presidential responses to brewing foreign conflicts.

“It’s hard to think of a president using more extreme language during crisis like this before,” said Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian. “Presidents usually try to use language that is even more moderate than what they may be feeling in private, because they’ve always been worried that their language might escalate a crisis.”

Mr. Truman delivered his muscular message at a time when the United States had an overwhelming military advantage over Japan, which did not have a nuclear weapon; Mr. Trump’s threat was aimed instead at a government that has developed nuclear weapons and has been testing intercontinental ballistic missiles. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: The war of words between the US and North Korea has escalated, with Donald Trump warning any threats would be met with “fire and fury” and Pyongyang promptly announcing it was “carefully examining” a plan to attack an American military base in the western Pacific.

Tensions on the Korean peninsula have been running high since North Korea’s two intercontinental ballistic missile tests last month and two nuclear bomb tests last year, which has lead to increased sanctions on the already isolated nation.

But despite two unpredictable nuclear-armed leaders trading barbs, most observers believe the possibility of conflict remains remote, with the North Korean leadership using its nuclear program as a bargaining chip rather than an offensive weapon. [Continue reading…]

Observations by Jean Lee, Wilson Center fellow, former AP Pyongyang bureau chief, Andrei Lankov, professor at Kookmin University, Seoul, and director of NK News, Jiyoung Song, senior lecturer in Korean studies, University of Melbourne, Robert Kelly, associate professor, Pusan National University, John Delury, North Korea expert, Yonsei University, Seoul, and Professor Andrew O’Neil, ballistic missile testing expert, Griffith University.

Jeffrey Lewis writes: It seems impossible to imagine the most impoverished, backward communist regime in Asia, run by a madman and recovering from a crippling famine, should set out to build a long-range missile that could deliver a nuclear weapon all the way to the United States. And yet Mao Zedong’s China did it.

In 1964, as today, Americans had trouble accepting the new reality of their vulnerability. United States officials were slow to realize that China was on the verge of testing a nuclear weapon that year, and later were surprised to learn that Beijing was not willing to settle for only short-range missiles that could strike neighbors like Japan. The scope of Mao’s ambition — to develop a thermonuclear weapon that could hit the United States — did not match American preconceptions of China. And so, collectively, we did not believe it.

Over the past few years, North Korea has made every possible effort to indicate that, like Mao’s China, it was committed to developing a nuclear-armed intercontinental range ballistic missile. Starting in 2014, North Korea began testing missiles at a much faster pace than before. Kim Jong-un, the country’s leader, began visiting defense industry plants all over the North, showing off newly built facilities and the new machine tools inside them. North Korea began releasing increasingly explicit pictures of its missile program, including some of new rocket engines and tests of the vehicle that would protect a nuclear weapon as it re-entered the atmosphere. [Continue reading…]