A good year for war?

Nearly all U.S. presidents are tested early in their tenures, but the speed with which Donald Trump and his administration have climbed the escalation ladder towards a showdown with North Korea over its nuclear weapons has been dizzying.

A military confrontation with the heavily armed regime in Pyongyang would be frightening under any circumstances, but the dangers are multiplied by the personalities involved. As two untested and mercurial leaders face off, the world waits to see who will blink first.

It was just two months ago that President Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe were dining at Mar-a-Lago when news came of a North Korean missile test, causing the president's young national security team to scramble for a response before curious diners at the exclusive club. Roughly two weeks later, U.S. and South Korean forces began an annual military exercise that Pyongyang viewed as provocative. Five days later, North Korea launched four ballistic missiles simultaneously into the Sea of Japan, and the U.S. military announced the deployment of an advanced antimissile defense system to South Korea.

After intelligence reports recently suggested that North Korea is preparing for its sixth nuclear weapons test on April 15 to celebrate the 105th birthday anniversary of Kim Il Sung, the current leader's grandfather, the Pentagon ordered the USS Carl Vinson carrier strike force to the Korean peninsula. "Multiple senior U.S. intelligence officials" then reportedly told NBC News that the administration is prepared to launch a preemptive military strike against North Korea if it follows through with the nuclear test.



As if to underscore that message, on April 14, the U.S. military for the first time dropped the largest conventional bomb in its inventory on an Islamic State cave complex in eastern Afghanistan. The 20,000-pound GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) - nicknamed "the mother of all bombs" - was developed in the early 2000s to deter Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from developing his own weapons of mass destruction. That followed by a week the cruise missile strike on a Syrian airbase in response to Bashar Assad's chemical weapons attack on a rebel-held city - an operation that coincided with Trump's dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago.

Any inference that the use of the MOAB was meant to send a signal to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is completely justified, according to a source knowledgeable of top Defense Department deliberations. The tactical goal was to kill ISIS fighters who had gained a foothold in eastern Afghanistan, he said, but it was also meant as a strategic shot across the bow of the North Korean regime. That message was apparently received loud and clear in Beijing, which has sent its top nuclear negotiator to North Korea, and according to intelligence site Stratfor, has suspended regular Air China flights to Pyongyang.

"I do think the Trump administration is using the Syrian missile strikes and dropping the MOAB to send a message to North Korea, especially because in the latter case using our biggest conventional bomb was operational overkill, and there were other smaller weapons that could have done the job," said Ian Williams, associate director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The MOAB is so big it must be dropped out of the back of slow-moving cargo aircraft, he noted, so it has limited usefulness against North Korean targets guarded by a robust air- defense system. "But I think the administration was aiming for the psychological impact. There's risk to that kind of pressure, though, because the more insecure the North Koreans feel about a preemptive strike that destroys their missile, nuclear or command-and-control capabilities, the more likely they might be to launch a preemptive strike of their own."

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