Fareed Zakaria Totally Doesn’t Buy Trump’s North Korea Rhetoric: ‘The Art of the Bluff’
On Thursday night, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria expressed some skepticism over President Trump‘s handling of North Korea.
“It’s stunning what President Trump has been doing,” Zakaria told Don Lemon. “Traditionally when the United States is dealing with other countries, the president is saved as the kind of last ratchet up in terms of warnings, in terms of using, you know, threats, in terms of deterrence.”
He continued, “You have lower level officials make statements. Those are cautious, careful. Then you have mid-level officials. Then you have high-level officials. And the president rarely makes the kind of threats, any kind of threats. These are very, very — that kind of credibility is viewed as very precious.”
He went on to call Trump’s reaction to North Korea’s rhetoric “absolutely extraordinary” and compared Trump’s “bluff” to Harry Truman.
“The only parallel think of is the one that President Trump is invoking, which is Harry Truman who said you will see a kind of fire and fury, the rain the kind of which the world has never seen, but of course that was at the end of a carefully thought through strategy designed to force Japan to surrender in the second World War, and when they didn’t, when Japan in a sense called his bluff, Harry Truman dropped two atomic bombs on Japan.”
But he then called what Trump’s doing “the art of the bluff.”
“This is what Trump does all the time, you know. He’s got amazing stuff on Obama, he’s going to reveal. Nothing. He’s going to move the embassy to Jerusalem, nothing. He’s going to recognize Taiwan, nothing. And my fear is the North Koreans have watched Donald Trump. You know, I think at some level, I sometimes wonder whether Trump thinks that the North Koreans don’t get CNN, so they don’t know what’s going on. But they know. They watch this guy make empty threats for much of his life and for a lot of his presidency. It’s very worrying.”
Watch the clip above, via CNN.
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