Bob Corker Says Trump’s Recklessness Threatens ‘World War III’

The senator, Mr. Trump said, had “begged” for his endorsement. “I said ‘NO’ and he dropped out (said he could not win without my endorsement),” the president wrote. He also said that Mr. Corker had asked to be secretary of state. “I said ‘NO THANKS,’” he wrote.

Mr. Corker flatly disputed that account, saying Mr. Trump had urged him to run again, and promised to endorse him if he did. But the exchange laid bare a deeper rift: The senator views Mr. Trump as given to irresponsible outbursts — a political novice who has failed to make the transition from show business.

Mr. Trump poses such an acute risk, the senator said, that a coterie of senior administration officials must protect him from his own instincts. “I know for a fact that every single day at the White House, it’s a situation of trying to contain him,” Mr. Corker said in a telephone interview.

The deeply personal back-and-forth will almost certainly rupture what had been a friendship with a fellow real estate developer turned elected official, one of the few genuine relationships Mr. Trump had developed on Capitol Hill. Still, even as he leveled his stinging accusations, Mr. Corker repeatedly said on Sunday that he liked Mr. Trump, until now an occasional golf partner, and wished him “no harm.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on Mr. Corker’s remarks.

Mr. Trump’s feud with Mr. Corker is particularly perilous given that the president has little margin for error as he tries to pass a landmark overhaul of the tax code — his best, and perhaps last, hope of producing a major legislative achievement this year.

If Senate Democrats end up unified in opposition to the promised tax bill, Mr. Trump could lose the support of only two of the Senate’s 52 Republicans to pass it. That is the same challenging math that Mr. Trump and Senate Republican leaders faced in their failed effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.

Mr. Corker could also play a key role if Mr. Trump follows through on his threat to “decertify” the Iran nuclear deal, kicking to Congress the issue of whether to restore sanctions on Tehran and effectively scuttle the pact.

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Republicans could hold off on sanctions but use the threat of them to force Iran back to the negotiating table — a strategy being advocated by Senator Tom Cotton, the Arkansas Republican. But that approach could leave the United States isolated, and it will be up to Mr. Corker to balance opposition to the deal with the wishes of those, including some of Mr. Trump’s own aides, who want to change the accord but not blow it up.

Beyond the Iran deal, Mr. Corker’s committee holds confirmation hearings on Mr. Trump’s ambassadorial appointments. If the president were to oust Rex W. Tillerson as secretary of state, as some expect, Mr. Corker would lead the hearings on Mr. Trump’s nominee for the post.

In a 25-minute conversation, Mr. Corker, speaking carefully and purposefully, seemed to almost find cathartic satisfaction by portraying Mr. Trump in terms that most senior Republicans use only in private.

The senator, who is close to Mr. Tillerson, invoked comments that the president made on Twitter last weekend in which he appeared to undercut Mr. Tillerson’s negotiations with North Korea.

“A lot of people think that there is some kind of ‘good cop, bad cop’ act underway, but that’s just not true,” Mr. Corker said.

Without offering specifics, he said Mr. Trump had repeatedly undermined diplomacy with his Twitter fingers. “I know he has hurt, in several instances, he’s hurt us as it relates to negotiations that were underway by tweeting things out,” Mr. Corker said.

All but inviting his colleagues to join him in speaking out about the president, Mr. Corker said his concerns about Mr. Trump were shared by nearly every Senate Republican.

“Look, except for a few people, the vast majority of our caucus understands what we’re dealing with here,” he said, adding that “of course they understand the volatility that we’re dealing with and the tremendous amount of work that it takes by people around him to keep him in the middle of the road.”

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As for the tweets that set off the feud on Sunday morning, Mr. Corker expressed a measure of powerlessness.

“I don’t know why the president tweets out things that are not true,” he said. “You know he does it, everyone knows he does it, but he does.”

The senator recalled four conversations this year, a mix of in-person meetings and phone calls, in which he said the president had encouraged him to run for re-election. Mr. Trump, he said, repeatedly indicated he wanted to come to Tennessee for an early rally on Mr. Corker’s behalf and even telephoned him last Monday to try to get him to reconsider his decision to retire.

“When I told him that that just wasn’t in the cards, he said, ‘You know, if you run, I’ll endorse you.’ I said, ‘Mr. President, it’s just not in the cards; I’ve already made a decision.’ So then we began talking about other candidates that were running.”

One of the most prominent establishment-aligned Republicans to develop a relationship with Mr. Trump, the senator said he did not regret standing with him during the campaign last year.

“I would compliment him on things that he did well, and I’d criticize things that were inappropriate,” he said. “So it’s been really the same all the way through.”

A former mayor of Chattanooga who became wealthy in construction, Mr. Corker, 65, has carved out a reputation over two terms in the Senate as a reliable, but not overly partisan, Republican.

While he opposed President Barack Obama’s divisive nuclear deal with Iran, he did not prevent it from coming to a vote on the Senate floor, which exposed him to fierce fire from conservatives, who blamed him for its passage.

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Mr. Trump picked up on that theme hours after his initial tweets, writing that “Bob Corker gave us the Iran Deal, that’s about it. We need HealthCare, we need Tax Cuts/Reform, we need people that can get the job done!”

Mr. Corker was briefly a candidate to be Mr. Trump’s running mate in 2016, but he withdrew his name from consideration and later expressed ambivalence about Mr. Trump’s campaign, in part because he said he found it frustrating to discuss foreign policy with him.

To some extent, the rift between the two men had been building for months, as Mr. Corker repeatedly pointed out on Sunday to argue that his criticism was not merely that of a man liberated from facing the voters again.

After a report last week that Mr. Tillerson had once referred to Mr. Trump as a “moron,” Mr. Corker told reporters that Mr. Tillerson was one of three officials helping to “separate our country from chaos.” Those remarks were repeated on “Fox News Sunday,” which may have prompted Mr. Trump’s outburst.

In August, after Mr. Trump’s equivocal response to the deadly clashes in Charlottesville, Va., Mr. Corker told reporters that the president “has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate in order to be successful.”

He said on Sunday that he had made all those comments deliberately, aiming them at “an audience of one, plus those people who are closely working around with him, what I would call the good guys.” He was referring to Mr. Tillerson, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and the White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly.

“As long as there are people like that around him who are able to talk him down when he gets spun up, you know, calm him down and continue to work with him before a decision gets made, I think we’ll be fine,” he said.

Mr. Corker would not directly answer when asked whether he thought Mr. Trump was fit for the presidency. But he did say that the commander in chief was not fully aware of the power of his office.

“I don’t think he appreciates that when the president of the United States speaks and says the things that he does, the impact that it has around the world, especially in the region that he’s addressing,” he said. “And so, yeah, it’s concerning to me.”

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In Seoul, South Koreans Unafraid as North Korea Steals US-South Attack Plans

I’m writing this from the South Korean capital, Seoul, where I’m on a flying one-day visit. I’m in the South, but can’t help thinking, often, about the North.

Seoul always seems to be gray in pictures and when I pass through. Gray buildings, gray skies. There’s gray mist rolling across the Hangang River outside my hotel window, the Seoul Tower that was clear on Namsan Mountain across the water now shrouded in cloud. 

Gray, yes. Scared, no. South Korea certainly doesn’t seem like a city in military lockdown. But the tension of this summer is a very real backdrop to a capital city going about its business.

My driver on the ride in from the airport wasn’t worried. Did he have any concerns about the latest increase in mad-dog barking from North Korea? “No,” he replied, “because they [the North] can’t do anything. And it’s been going on for so long.”

But was he worried that President Donald Trump might do something rash, by accident even, that might propel the peninsula into war? He thought longer about that one. Perhaps he just didn’t want to consider that prospect, but he shook his head slowly without saying anything, apparently resigned to the status quo.

Only, maybe this time around, the situation isn’t the same. The Korean peninsula has gained a lot more prominence in my mind given the events of the summer. With Trump tweeting, cryptically, that “only one thing will work” in dealing with a nuclearized North Korea, I feel there are itchy fingers over red buttons.

When I moved to Asia in 2001, I knew the two Koreas never signed a peace pact after the 1950-53 Korean War. But that asterisk on the record of military history didn’t mean anything to me. In the 16 years since then, the fact the two Koreas are still technically at war didn’t matter one bit. But it certainly felt, for a few weeks this summer, that we were closer than in many years to a potentially devastating war.

Sitting here 35 miles from the border with the North makes the situation that little bit more real. The War Museum commemorating those events of 60-some years ago is a short cab ride away. And if not outright conflict, then the tension is a constant white noise in the background.

The Korean Joongang Daily -­- “Your window to Korea” — told me fresh off the plane that former president Jimmy Carter now hopes to meet with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un to broker a new peace pact between the rogue state and the United States.

Carter helped orchestrate a resolution to another nuclear crisis, in 1994, when he met with “founding father” Kim Il-sung shortly before his death that July. His son Kim Jong-il then adopted the Agreed Framework that froze North Korea’s nuclear program in exchange for fuel oil and assistance building two light-water reactors to generate power.

It would probably be a mistake for Carter to lead such a delegation, because it would lend credibility to Kim’s actions in testing nuclear weapons and sailing ballistic missiles over Japan. And now that North Korea is clearly nuclearized, I’m not sure it would accomplish much. Kim, people often say, saw what happened to Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein. There’s no way he’ll give up his nukes.

Recently, he appeared to be acting like a stroppy teenager to keep on attracting attention. But Kim, the grandson and lookalike of the founding “Great Leader,” may have had more method to his madness than immediately obvious.

On Tuesday, South Korean lawmaker Lee Cheol-hee said that North Korean hackers had stolen a digital truckload of military secrets from a defense data center. The theft, according to the Financial Times, includes the latest plans for a joint U.S.-South Korea “decapitation” strike on North Korea to eliminate its leadership.

Kim, needless to say, isn’t too happy about all this. He has changed his daily routine, the FT reports, and switched the cars he selects for travel.

His state news agency responded to Trump’s latest tweet implying a “military solution” to an unsolvable problem with a more-moderate comment than normal. The agency said the country’s nuclear program is a “powerful deterrent firmly safeguarding the peace and security in the Korean peninsula and Northeast Asia.”

Kim’s kin are also clearly waging a crypto-war with South Korean and U.S. forces (who I’m sure are responding in kind). Seoul has already announced the setting up of a special military unit dedicated to eliminating Kim in the case of war, while the CIA said it May it has established a Korea Mission Center to address “the nuclear and ballistic missile threat posed by North Korea.”

Lee, a member of the ruling Democratic Party, says that in the recent theft, the North Korean spies got their digital hands on 235 gigabytes of data. That includes contingency plans for South Korean special forces and information about key military facilities and power plants. 

The Korean hackers aren’t restricted to military matters. Their own itchy keyboards have led them into cause for commercial concern, too.

North Korean hackers have been blamed for attacks on corporations and governments globally, even for the malwear WannaCry. The National Security Agency has tracked that computer worm back to code crafted in North Korea, and says “with moderate confidence” that it leads back to North Korea’s spy agency, the Reconnaissance General Bureau, the Washington Post reports. 

Most recently, hackers backed by Pyongyang have tried to steal Bitcoin from South Korean exchanges, to evade the harsh sanctions put into place against the Kim regime.

South Korean stocks languished this summer while the nuclear brinkmanship played out its tit-for-tat war of words. Having set an all-time high in mid-July, they sailed south to the tune of 5.0% by mid-August, and re-tested that low in September.

Korean stocks have found new perk, up 2.6% since September 27. Investors have remained sanguine that the South is safe, and nothing will ultimately come, physically, from a dangerous diplomatic game. Seoul, too, is cloaked in the comfort of the 9-to-5, as well as cloud.

Just mist and nothing more sinister, I think to myself, taking a last look out of the window before heading off to work myself.

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