Trump’s Threat of War With North Korea May Sound Scarier Than It Is<br />American anxiety over North Korea spiked on Tuesday when President Trump warned that, if the country makes any<br />more threats against the United States, it “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”<br />Social media filled with nervous jokes and at times outright panic over whether Mr. Trump<br />and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, could bluster their way into unintended nuclear war.<br />Current American action, or lack thereof, sends a message of calm and caution, rather than “fire and fury.”<br />States have a hard time reading one another’s internal politics, so they tend to<br />rely heavily on reading one another’s actions for clues as to their intentions.<br />And while Mr. Trump’s comment hint at an appetite for war, the institutions<br />that carry out American foreign policy — particularly the military — have behaved conservatively, giving the world ample reason to dismiss his statement.
