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Kim Jong-Un during a combat drill; Donald Trump listens during a news conference in the East Room of the White House.

Left, from KNS/AFP; Right, by Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg, both from Getty Images.

The world breathed a sigh of relief Saturday after North Korea decided not to test a nuclear weapona provocation that the Trump administration had warned could lead the U.S. to launch a military attackopting instead to mark the 105th birthday of its founding leader, the late Kim Il Sung, with a massive military parade in Pyongyang. A missile test the following day failed seconds after liftoff, a humiliating setback that temporarily defused mounting geopolitical tensions over Kim Jong Uns nuclear ambitions. On Monday, U.S. equities rose as fears of an all-out war subsided.

How President Donald Trump intends to resolve the growing North Korean crisis remains unclear, though whether that is by design or reflects a lack of a coherent foreign policy is a matter of some debate. Over the past several weeks, as Kim has moved aggressively to advance his nuclear weapons program, the Trump administration has telegraphed a wide range of possibilities as to how the U.S. might respond. Last month, during his first major diplomatic tour of Asia, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson declared that the policy of strategic patience has ended and that all options are on the table for dealing with North Korea. On Monday, Vice President Mike Pence repeated that line while making a surprise appearance on the South Korean side of the Demilitarized Zone separating the two countries, which have been locked in a military standoff since the suspension of the Korean War in 1953. North Korea will do well not to test his resolve or strength of the armed forces of the United States in this region, he added.

While the era of strategic patience may be over, the Trump administration is clearly taking some kind of strategic steps. Last week, the president announced that he had ordered an armada of military ships, including the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Carl Vinson and several nuclear submarines, to sail toward North Korea. NBC News reported that the National Security Council had presented Trump with a list of potential responses to North Korea, including moving missiles to South Korea or outright assassinating Kim. And while the White House quietly dismissed a subsequent report that Trump was prepared to launch a pre-emptive conventional strike if Kim reached for the nuclear trigger last weekend, as he had been expected to do, the president warned that the North Korean problem will be taken care of one way or another. On Monday, Pence also said that the U.S. would be open to securing the region through peaceable means, through negotiations, suggesting that Trump may be coming around to Beijings way of thinking.

The ambiguity of Trumps warnings, combined with the credible threat that he might be crazy enough to see them through, has yielded some results. China appears to be working more closely with the U.S. then before to increase pressure on Kimcooperation that Trump suggested on Twitter that he had bought by backing away from labeling China a currency manipulator. And Kim seemed to have called off his expected nuclear testfor now.

Certainly it makes people nervous when theyre not quite sure what he means by it, former ambassador to South Korea Christopher Hill said during an appearance on ABSs This Week on Sunday. At the same time, he suggested, Trumps more hawkish approach raises the risks of a sudden escalation with deadly results. And, you know, great powers cant really bluff. So when you talk in those terms, youve got to be prepared to back it up. And I guess thats what worries people the most.

Trump has said repeatedly in the past that he doesnt intend to broadcast to the enemy exactly what my plan is (although he did precisely that when he warned Russia before launching a missile strike in Syria earlier this month). If there is any kind of Trump Doctrine, it might be a sort of calibrated volatility, keeping adversaries constantly on edge. A less generous interpretation, however, might be that the new president simply doesnt understand what he is doing and is making foreign policy on the fly. It only seemed to occur to Trump that Vladimir Putin is backing an evil person in Syria after his moves to bolster his alliance with the Gulf States put him into greater contention with Russiaa dynamic that he never seemed to anticipate on the campaign trail. Politico reports that Trump didnt ask for an assessment of why Syrian president Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons until after he had ordered his retaliatory strike. Last week, Trump himself told The Wall Street Journal that he didnt actually understand Chinas position on North Korea until the president of China, Xi Jinping, explained it to him. After listening for 10 minutes, I realized its not so easy, he said.

Trumps loose talk of war could force Pyonyang and Beijing to the table, but it could also backfire. After all, the threat of a foreign invasion is precisely why North Korea has been preparing a massive military force for the last 40 yearsand why it is racing to develop long-range nuclear weapons as a deterrent. As The New York Times notes, Kim learned his lesson from the late Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, who was deposed and killed only a few hours after agreeing to give up his nuclear weapons program. The question for Trump is whether he is bothering to learn any lessons of his own before raising the stakes in East Asia. A nuclear standoff is no time for on-the-job training.

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Donald Trump Stumbles Toward War in East Asia - Vanity Fair