Trump’s destabilizing policies threaten America’s nuclear deterrence strategy–traitorous action or simply ignorance?

  Seventy years of bi-partisanship have gone into creating a credible deterrence strategy to cope with the challenges posed to our foreign policy in an era of nuclear powers and the means of delivering them. Our deterrence strategy rests upon the elimination and reduction of doubt as to whether certain actions against ourselves and our allies will produce a response by the U.S. that is unacceptable to a potential enemy. The weaving of alliances and other measures taken to implement and maintain this strategy has been supported by every President, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of State, both Republican and Democratic, since the fateful dropping of those early atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended World War II and ushered in the dangerous  nuclear age. This credibility of our response and commitments to our allies have been seriously, if not fatally, weakened by Donald Trump’s clearly ignorant insertion of doubt into the equation. He might as well have invited North Korea across the “no-man’s land” and across the 38th parallel and on into our...