Bad Romance

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, August 17, 2026

 

There are four horsemen one encounters in trying to write 2,500 words about American politics every weekday. One is despair. The second is fatigue. The third is anxiety around finding a topic. The fourth is getting ahead of oneself.

 

The last is the least common but shows up more often than I’d like. For instance, imagine writing a newsletter about Republicans losing their image as “the party of strength” two days before the president publishes this unwitting proof of your thesis:

 

Based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea, I am not happy with the fact that the United States has, long ago, agreed to participate in Joint Military Exercises with South Korea. These exercises are not only costly, with much of these costs paid for by the United States of America (as usual!), but send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful. Therefore, and based on the fact that it is too late to cancel, I have instructed Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to substantially reduce the Joint Military Exercises! While somewhat unrelated (?), I recently asked the President of South Korea if they would like to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they said, “No thanks!” Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP

 

See? See? What did I tell you?

 

There. Seven words down, 2,493 to go.

 

Fortunately, there’s more to say about the latest “love” letter from the president to his former beau than repeating the points in Friday’s column. So let’s pick up where that piece left off with this question: Realistically, what more could the United States do at this point to signal that it won’t, or can’t, defend the Far East from Chinese and North Korean aggression?

 

Pivot from Asia.

 

To begin with, the crisis in U.S. munitions stockpiles caused by the Iran war is now an open secret, part of the calculus in Beijing and Pyongyang. Our Asian allies saw it coming from a mile away, too.

 

As far back as late March, a month after the conflict began, they were watching the escalation in the Persian Gulf “with dread.” The Pentagon had already been forced at that point to redeploy Patriot missiles and a state-of-the-art THAAD air-defense system from South Korea to the Middle East. Less than five months later, 80 percent of the total U.S. inventory of THAAD interceptors and half the inventory of Patriots is gone. And won’t be replenished anytime soon.

 

Other American assets are also leaving the region. The Associated Press reported Saturday that the USS George Washington—the only U.S. carrier still operating in the Pacific—is headed to the Gulf to relieve the USS Abraham Lincoln before conditions aboard the latter deteriorate further. China will use America’s local absence in its “narrative to demonstrate to the Philippines, to Japan, to Indonesia and others that … China is the bigger power and the U.S. is not able to guarantee their security anymore,” one defense analyst told the AP.

 

All of that follows months of signaling by the White House that it now regards China as a “peer power” whom it prefers to accommodate rather than confront. “Constructive strategic stability” is the administration’s diplo-jargon for that posture, the New York Times noted in June: “The new catchphrase signals to agencies in both nations, and to other powers, that the United States and China—the world’s two largest economies and most powerful militaries—are looking to work together or limit hostilities, notably on trade and Taiwan.” The president himself made the pitch on camera, in slobbering terms, when he visited Beijing in May.

 

One might wonder whether postliberals’ bellicosity toward China circa 2016 was always a ruse meant to create a pretext to reduce U.S. military commitments around the world, with no intention of ever “pivoting to Asia” to contain a fellow illiberal regime. But then, I’ve gotten ahead of myself on that topic too.

 

If Trump still cared about deterring China or North Korea, he’d refrain from needlessly antagonizing U.S. allies in the Far East. After all, the more evidence there is of a rift between the U.S. and regional powers, raising doubt about America’s willingness to defend them, the more Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un might be tempted to try their luck militarily. That’s what hawks call “provocative weakness,” and the president engages in it regularly—usually toward Europe but sometimes further afield, as a no doubt very alarmed South Korean government is realizing this morning.

 

The cherry on this very unappetizing sundae is that North Korea hasn’t been behaving in an “unthreatening and respectful” way lately, as Trump falsely claimed. If anything, the regime has been more belligerent than it was over most of the last 73 years, “gaining battlefield expertise with drones and modern warfare by deploying troops to support Russia’s war in Ukraine.” Kim has spent the eight years since his last summit with Trump building out his nuclear arsenal in hopes of extorting the U.S. for new diplomatic concessions, including sanctions relief. The president reportedly tried to send him a letter sometime earlier this year to reopen communications—and Kim refused to accept it.

 

A few days ago the North Koreans fired several ballistic missiles to protest the upcoming joint military exercises between the United States and South Korea. Our tough-guy leader’s response was to hurriedly scale back the operation, badmouth Seoul, and praise Kim disingenuously for his commitment to peace. That’s not so much “provocative weakness” as it is out-and-out appeasement of a rogue state, and it reportedly left the Pentagon “taken aback.”

 

Why did Trump do it?

 

It’s personal.

 

I see three possibilities, from least to most likely. The first is necessity.

 

The Wall Street Journal published an alarming story yesterday about Iran’s increasingly hardline leadership plotting to “widen the war and raise the costs for the U.S.” rather than wait to respond to the next round of American attacks. Escalation could include “sabotaging Internet cables in the Persian Gulf, creating political unrest in countries with Shia communities such as Kuwait and Bahrain, and potentially even ground operations in Kuwait.” One Israeli source told the paper that the Iranians are bringing damaged missile bases back online more quickly than expected as well.

 

Meanwhile, Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine has reportedly urged the White House to find an “off-ramp” from the war, and Trump is doing his best to comply, opting for a “low-key” blockade of Iranian ports instead of renewed bombing. He appears to understand, and to accept, that further military escalation isn’t in America’s interest. But as the saying goes: In war, the enemy gets a vote.

 

If the president fears that the conflict in Iran is about to get very hot, he may be anticipating having to redeploy U.S. assets in the Far East to the Persian Gulf en masse. And if that’s going to happen, it’s probably better strategically to frame that redeployment as a matter of choice rather than a matter of necessity. We *could* help defend South Korea from a North Korean invasion while waging war on Iran, you see. Mighty America still retains a two-front capability! We simply *choose* not to do so because we’re mad at the South Koreans for whatever reason.

 

On this theory, Trump scaling back the military exercises is part of a larger spin operation to try to obscure the decline in U.S. military power by reframing retreat as a matter of dopey “America First” preferences. And the president is eager to hide that decline for obvious policy (and narcissistic) reasons. But even so, it all seems too clever by half. He’s been grousing about the alliance with South Korea for a decade, and he’s shown zero capacity for strategic foresight with respect to Iran. Why shouldn’t we take his post about this week’s joint military exercise at face value?

 

He’s probably sincerely miffed that the South Koreans didn’t want to get involved with his dumb Gulf war and is keen to punish them for it, whatever the consequences for American hegemony might be. Simple as that.

 

The second possibility is more probable: Rapprochement with North Korea has become another weird idée fixe in which Trump is emotionally invested for legacy reasons. Maybe Kim or his deputies quietly made it known to the White House that going ahead with the military exercises as scheduled would extinguish any chance of a third summit before he leaves office, and the president, unable to bear the thought, scrambled to satisfy them.

 

Usually his obsessions are vanity projects, like the White House ballroom or Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, or involve restoring random vestiges of how America did things during the glory days of his youth. His interest in face-to-face diplomacy with Kim is a bit of both. It’s a vanity project insofar as Trump plainly relished becoming the first U.S. president to meet with a leader of North Korea, another feather in his cap as a peacemaker of supposedly singular stature. And it’s a vestige of how America did things in his youth: If Richard Nixon could make history by going to China to make nice with communists, why can’t Donald Trump make history by going to the DMZ for a tête-à-tête between zaftig autocrats?

 

The special enchantment he feels for North Korean diplomacy, I suspect, is that it’s personal. Other presidents avoided personal diplomacy with Pyongyang because they didn’t want to lend American prestige to an abhorrent regime; Kim cleverly turned that around by playing to Trump’s thirst for monarchical prestige by insisting on leader-to-leader talks. The implication was that only the grandeur of a figure as exalted as the president himself could convince North Korea to set aside its long, implacable hostility to the United States.

 

The core of Trump’s narcissism, as he once famously said, is that “I alone can fix it.” Kim affirmed his belief by suggesting that Trump alone can fix the U.S.-North Korea relationship.

 

Nothing South Korea can say or do for the United States will ever make the president feel as special. To the postliberal mind, which divides the world between “friends” and “enemies” and perceives no distinction between the ruler’s personal interests and the interests of the state, maintaining a personal relationship with Pyongyang obviously takes precedence over maintaining a diplomatic one with Seoul. The fact that one nation is a belligerent third-world Stalinist abyss and the other a prosperous liberal democracy means less than nothing.

 

And so the military exercises were scaled back. Call it a favor for a friend.

 

Nutty even for him.

 

I’m leaning toward the third possibility, though. Maybe the snafu with South Korea is evidence of Trump descending further into the “YOLO phase” of lame-duckery.

 

He’s an 80-year-old strongman who’s been humiliated by his failure to break Iran’s grip on the Strait of Hormuz. He knows what his polling looks like, even if he’s reportedly “in denial” about it and distracting himself with fun hobbies like picking out wallpaper for his ballroom and slapping new tariffs on Canada. He also has some dim intimation, one assumes, that his presidency will not be remembered as a golden age of American prestige overseas.

 

My theory about the YOLO phase is that the less Trump has to lose by behaving destructively to cope with his diminishment, the more destructively he’ll behave. And as a Democratic wave in November becomes more likely and the end of his presidency inches closer, he has less to lose every day.

 

Tom Nichols sees evidence of that sort of cope in the president’s turnabout on military exercises with Seoul. “He is seeking to assuage the psychic injury of his loss in Iran—including the American public learning of the shameful conditions to which he has subjected U.S. forces—by kicking America’s allies, the nations he can punish without fear that they will kick him back,” Nichols wrote at The Atlantic.

 

If the only way Trump can reclaim a sense of dominance is to let U.S. allies be menaced by Russia and China until they beg for his favor, he’ll do so. That’s what the YOLO phase is all about.

 

There’s a different kind of cope in which he seems to be indulging more lately, though. It’s hard to measure these things, as the president has been riffing inanely in public appearances for 10 years, but his trial balloons increasingly seem to be falling into the nutty-even-for-him column.

 

On Friday, the president told an audience that he intends to claim the Strait of Hormuz as U.S. territory after Iran is defeated. His fans would say that he was joking, but he’s talked before in interviews about America becoming “the guardian of the strait” and being “reimbursed” for it by other nations. It was just last month that he announced a (later retracted) plan to extort tankers transiting Hormuz for 20 percent of the value of their cargo, never mind that the White House has said for months that international waterways should be open to all.

 

One of the biggest news stories in the country right now is sailors aboard the Abraham Lincoln struggling after spending nine straight months at sea. Meanwhile, the president is fantasizing about seizing a channel halfway around the world that would require a permanent naval presence in the Gulf to secure it. His grasp on the limits of his own power is slipping.

 

Another odd ad lib: On the other side of the strait sits the nation of Oman, an American ally that’s been intermediating between the U.S. and Iran to try to find a solution to the impasse. The Iranians want Oman to join its scheme to charge “fees” on ships passing through Hormuz while Washington naturally opposes the idea. This morning Trump was asked about the dilemma on Fox News and tactfully replied, “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the s—t out of them.”

 

Laying aside the fact that that would amount to the president starting a second war without congressional approval (if Richard Nixon could bomb Cambodia, why can’t Donald Trump bomb Oman?), attacking a Gulf ally would be supreme proof to America’s other partners that it’s time to look elsewhere for global leadership. It’s not a coincidence that Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan signed a mutual defense agreement last week “to diversify their security and defense partnerships,” as one European official delicately put it to the Washington Post. Only a fool would rely on a declining superpower led by an erratic madman.

 

Queeg-like.

 

The most unnerving Trump “ad libs” recently have nothing to do with bombastic threats involving Iran, though.

 

Last week the White House ordered the Navy to get rid of its modern electromagnetic system for propelling jets off the decks of aircraft carriers and revert to the antiquated steam-powered system of decades ago, never mind the consequences for the Pentagon’s budget or for military readiness. The Post reported Sunday that the overhaul might not end there: The president also wants the command tower on the Navy’s Ford-class aircraft carriers moved from the rear of each ship toward the front.

 

The cost would be “significant” and would affect the vessels’ weight and buoyancy, according to experts. So why bother? Quote: “Trump’s preference, current and former officials said, is for the new aircraft carriers to look more like those that were in service during World War II.”

 

As I said earlier, there’s nothing new about the president hatching an idiotic belief that America should go back to doing things a certain way simply because that’s how America did it during his youth. But there’s a distinctly Captain Queeg-like quality to him ruminating about the minutiae of carrier aesthetics—for the stupidest possible reason—at a moment when the United States can’t even field a carrier in China’s backyard. That’s the sound of a man who’s no longer engaged with the duties of command in a meaningful way and has retreated into childish fantasy.

 

I thought the YOLO phase would be dangerous because it would leave him less inhibited about following his authoritarian impulses. What if it ends up being dangerous in a different way, when his already-threadbare tether to reality frays completely?

 

That’s too desperate a thought to end on (the first horseman is always near) so I’ll leave you with this happier one, from a Twitter user who looked on the bright side of the president’s fascination with figures like Kim, Xi, and Vladimir Putin: “I’m really glad President Obama rid the world of Osama bin Laden before Donald Trump had the chance to befriend him.” Thanks, Obama.