A Presidential Misunderstanding of Deterrence

How are we to make sense of the president of the United States—a man with unitary launch authority for over a thousand nuclear weapons—going before the United Nations General Assembly and threatening to annihilate a sovereign state? That’s exactly what President Donald Trump did on Tuesday, halfway into a long, winding speech on everything from sovereignty to UN funding. “The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea,” Trump read carefully from his teleprompter. In one breath, he touted the virtues of the nation-state and sovereignty and, in another, promised the utter destruction of a sovereign state.

While Trump’s apocalyptic rhetoric and threat to commit a expressly forbidden by international humanitarian law will surely go down in General Assembly history, their underlying logic is undeniably familiar. The remarks echoed similar, countless deterrent threats