Last week I floated the idea that Trump’s belligerence towards North Korea may be a pressure ploy to see who blinks first and define the limits of China and Russia’s support for the Nuclear weapons programs there and in Iran.

Trump has been steadily applying pressure on China and North Korea since he took office.  And I’ve developed that initial off-the-cuff “vamp” of an idea into a full-blown thesis.  Written on Saturday and published on Sunday, here’s the meat of it:

Ratcheting up the rhetoric and putting Kim Jong Un in an ever-tighter noose is a game of brinksmanship that worries many, including me. But, it’s only under extreme pressure do catastrophic (in the evolutionary biology/mathematical sense) events occur.

If you want to radically change the dynamic then you have to apply extreme pressure. I feel this is what Trump and his advisors are doing. They are appearing to “have the strength to force the moment to its crisis” to quote T.S. Eliot.

And that strength of purpose is creating large movements. Trump is a bully. It’s what he does, at least publicly. The response so far from China has been to denounce the idea of regime change in Pyongyang.

After that, we had strong responses from both Russia and China saying there was a way out of this mess.  Trump refused their initial offer.  Kim threatened Guam with a missile strike.

And at that point, that’s when China’s limit was reached.  China then flat-out told Kim, if you strike the U.S. you are on your own.

Bingo.  There’s your catastrophic policy mutation.  That’s the basis for a future deal.

Then when you factor in that Trump is seriously floating the idea of pulling the troops out of Afghanistan then the picture gets a whole lot clearer.

Yesterday at Halseynews I published an article titled, “The U.S. War in Afghanistan is Ending.”

But to get more from them, Trump will have to give on something beyond just standing down militarily. And that something may be Afghanistan. He’s unhappy with the advice he’s been given and sent his military advisors, grumbling, to come up with better plans.

Personally, I think he may just be buying time to keep the pressure on China.

A pullout from Afghanistan if negotiations with the Taliban fail would be the tit for North Korea’s tat.

And it would win Trump tremendous points with the base back home on two major issues – denuclearizing North Korea and bringing the troops home from Afghanistan.

And this morning Kim backed down on his threat to nuke Guam.  Was it all a bluff? If so, who was bluffing whom?  I don’t doubt with Gen. Mattis as his Secretary of Defense that Trump was prepared to use military force on Kim.

But, the bigger question is whether they knew he would back down if China abandoned him.  That’s the question we’ll likely never get answered and, frankly, it doesn’t matter.

If Trump can get everyone to sit down and broker a deal that involves guaranteeing everyone’s best behavior, then the rest of his presidency could be a big nothing-burger and he’ll still be the most effective president of the past twenty-five years.

I won’t say I haven’t had my doubts, and those doubts were warranted.  But, a deal like this would send the neocons into apoplexy while Soros overplays his hand domestically allowing Antifa to roam the streets destroying our history.