Former Obama Diplomat Reminds Trump How Level-Headed Presidents Handle Foreign Crises

Reminding the country what a sensible and level-headed foreign policy looks like, former National Security Adviser and UN Ambassador Susan Rice said on Thursday that Donald Trump has to stop lashing out at everything the North Koreans do.

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In an interview with CNN, the former Obama official said there is a difference between being strong and being reckless.

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Rice said:

We need to be very clear: Any attack on the United States, our territories, our allies would be met with the most powerful response, particularly if it involved nuclear weapons. But we cannot react – we just can’t react to every statement or verbal provocation that comes out of North Korea.

Rice’s comments served as a reminder of how much more responsible the former administration was when it came to dealing with international crises.

Rice also openly worried about the possibility that the current administration might attack North Korea without “an imminent or actual threat against the United States.”

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Rice said:

What I worry about is this discussion and preparation potentially for what the administration has called preventive war or pre-emptive war, which would envision the United States potentially attacking North Korea in the absence of an imminent or actual threat against the United States. Deterrence makes good sense. That’s very essential for us to maintain, and obviously we don’t ever take off the table the threat of the use of force. But pre-emptive war … would be catastrophic.

The differences between the previous administration and the current one were made even more clear on Thursday when Trump continued to play right into the hands of North Korea by doubling down on his “fire and fury” comments that he made earlier in the week.

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Instead of dialing back his rhetoric and pretending to be a responsible president for a day, Trump said that his off-the-cuff “fire and fury” remarks “weren’t tough enough.”

After eight years of a president who showed self-restraint and took these issues seriously, we now have a commander-in-chief who – as Hillary Clinton warned us in 2016 – loses his cool at the slightest provocation.

Sean Colarossi

Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.