President Donald Trump has "wisely not drawn red lines" when it comes to North Korea, as he wants to be able to "match his rhetoric with his actions" and to be as measured as possible, Homeland Security Adviser Thomas Bossert said Sunday.
"The one red line that he did inherit from the last president, he enforced," Bossert told CNN "State of the Union" anchor Jake Tapper, referring to former President Barack Obama's "red line" declaration on chemical weapons in Syria.
And like Obama's red line, Trump also inherited the issues with North Korea, said Bossert, However, through tough rhetoric, he said, Trump is looking "into the cameras and into the eyes of the leadership of North Korea as they continue to pursue a nuclearized ICBM program."
"This is something that President Trump inherited," said Bossert. "He inherited this frankly from the last three presidents. He is behaving in ways that try to deploy and employ diplomacy and words without the necessary military action and might, to give the space necessary for those talks and resolutions to succeed."
The president is not going to talk about passive solutions, Bossert told Tapper, but will continue to "demand change, demand the denuclearized north Korean government."
Trump has also gotten China and Russia to join in a UN Security Council vote for sanctions.
"This is an opportunity for this president to lead," said Bossert. "He's led in North Korea. He's leading in South America. He's leading here in the home front and I think yesterday what you'll see here was a theme of unity. He went to the Middle East and called for love and cessation and he has got every foreign leader, and those in the security council on his side. I know that is hard for people to hear."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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