NO KOREA SUCCESSFULLY TESTS AN ICBM.

AFP PHOTO/KCNA VIA KNS

The U.S. government confirmed that North Korea successfully tested an intercontinental ballistic missile, crossing a chilling threshold. 

The latest missile flew higher and remained in the air longer than previous attempts — enough to reach all of Alaska,” Anne Gearan and Emily Rauhala report. “The launch follows a string of recent actions by Pyongyang, including a salvo of missiles last month and three tests in May. Kim has now launched more missiles in one year than his father and predecessor in the family dynasty did in 17 years in power. North Korea has also conducted five nuclear weapons tests since 2006, including two last year.

 Experts say the missile was a “real ICBM” and showed technical sophistication that Western experts believed North Korea was years away from mastering. “North Korea’s apparent accomplishment puts it well ahead of schedule,” Joby Warrick explains. “The Hwasong-14 tested Monday could not have reached the U.S. mainland, analysts say, and there’s no evidence to date that North Korea is capable of building a miniaturized nuclear warhead to fit on one of its longer-range missiles. But there is now little reason to doubt that both are within North Korea’s grasp.”

The past three presidents have tried to negotiate, only to learn that Pyongyang can never be trusted....The president-elect believed he could use his reputation for unpredictability to unnerve and intimidate America’s adversaries into making concessions that they would not otherwise make. Some people close to Trump thought, for example, that North Korea might come to the table out of fear that the American president might just be crazy enough to take preemptive military action. 

• Foreign policy experts generally agree there is a handful of possible options, but with a country as unstable as North Korea, none of them are ideal. The first would be to continue the Obama-era policy of “strategic patience,” essentially working to punish the regime through further sanctions and diplomatic means in the hopes that they start behaving better. [The Atlantic / Mark Bowden]

 As the first president in U.S. history with no prior military or government experience, Trump has clearly never studied “deterrence theory”: If he thought a show of force would deter North Korea, he thought wrong. If anything, the president’s previous saber-rattling has only driven the regime to accelerate its efforts to build a nuclear weapon capable of striking the mainland United States.

North Korea’s ability to bomb American population centers – whether Seattle, San Francisco or Los Angeles – would dramatically change the Washington calculus and massively constrain our ability to use military force. That’s the whole point of these tests. “The fear is not that Mr. Kim would launch a pre-emptive attack on the West Coast; that would be suicidal, and if the 33-year-old leader has demonstrated anything in his five years in office, he is all about survival,” David Sanger writes on the front page of today’s New York Times. “As he looks around the world, he sees cases like that of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya — an authoritarian who gave up his nascent nuclear program, only to be deposed, with American help, as soon as his people turned against him. That is what Mr. Kim believes his nuclear program will prevent — an American effort to topple him. He may be right.”

“There is no good option here,” former acting CIA director Michael Morell said on “CBS This Morning.” “There is no military option here to destroy the nuclear program (or) his missile program. There is no option to do that that wouldn't start a second Korean War and wouldn't raise the possibility of him using nuclear weapons against his neighbors. The risks are extraordinarily high in a military standoff.”

While China pledges cooperation with the United States over North Korea, Beijing has not fundamentally shifted away from a strategy that balances pressure on the Kim regime with keeping the regime afloat, said Chris Steinitz, a research scientist at the federally funded, nonprofit Center for Naval Analyses. “It’s kind of how China looks at everything. They have a very long view,” Steinitz told my colleagues Anne and Emily. “They will wait. They will bide their time. They have a lot of priorities.”

• [While] President Xi Jinping of China is known for acting boldly, but for all the grief Pyongyang and its nuclear tests have been causing him, his options are limited as well.

Don’t forget that the U.S.-Sino relationship involves far more than North Korea: China yesterday vowed to step up its air and sea patrols after a U.S. warship sailed near a disputed island in the South China Sea, and last week the United States announced a new arms deal with Taiwan. 

 US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley warned China that if it continues to trade with North Korea, the US would consider pulling its trade deals with China. [Associated Press / Edith Lederer].

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....“Global action is required to stop a global threat,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said in a statement yesterday afternoon. “Any country that hosts North Korean guest workers, provides any economic or military benefits, or fails to fully implement UN Security Council resolutions is aiding and abetting a dangerous regime. All nations should publicly demonstrate to North Korea that there are consequences to their pursuit of nuclear weapons.”

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-- Is Trump’s mental health “immaterial”? At the Aspen Ideas Festival last week, during a panel on U.S. national security in the Trump era, former CIA director David Petraeus defended the president’s foreign policy. He said Trump’s national security team is the strongest he had ever seen, and he argued that Trump is far more decisive than Obama, who he said was indecisive to the point of paralysis.

David Rothkopf, who teaches at Columbia University and was previously chief executive at Foreign Policy magazine, was moderating the panel. He noted that, for the first time, he’s getting regular questions about the mental health of the president. He asked Petraeus if he thought the president was fit to serve. “It’s immaterial,” he reportedly replied, arguing that because the team around Trump is so good, they can offset whatever deficits he might have.

“I was floored. It was a stunningly weak defense,” Rothkoph writes in an op-ed for today’s Post. “Daily he shows he lacks the character, discipline, intellect, judgment or respect for the office to be president of the United States.