Donald Trump is famously a member of the school of negotiators who likes to start by putting maximum demands on the table. When you add that to his repeated insistence that all previous administrations had consistently made terrible deals, it was clear that he was going to threaten nuclear war. I predicted it months ago, and it has now come to pass.
Even discussing the nuclear option has been taboo until now. It creates the following problems:
- If you put using nukes on the table and draw a red line, you are running the risk that someone will assume you are bluffing (and you probably are). Then what? If the threat isn’t real, it can be safely ignored. That means it has to be used to remain credible.
- If we can put nukes on the table, so can the Russians, Chinese, Indians, and Pakistanis–and they will. Sooner or later, someone is going to follow through with the threat, and the entire world will have to live with the results.