“Washington has a long habit of painting its enemies 10 feet tall—and crazy,” as Fareed Zakaria once noted. Thus, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster in December called North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program—which according to American intelligence still probably lacks the capacity to hit the U.S. mainland with a nuclear weapon—“the most destabilizing development, I think, in the post-World War II period.” More destabilizing, evidently, than Stalin or Mao’s far ...

The more closely you read Donald Trump’s comments about North Korea in his State of the Union address, the more plausible it becomes that he is preparing for war. …

Since Donald Trump became president, pundits have wondered what it would take for the Republican establishment to stand up to him. Now we know. …

Government shutdowns are a useful window into what really matters to politicians. It’s one thing to say you care about an issue. It’s another to care about it enough to tell hundreds of thousands of federal employees to stay home, and to risk the political blowback that arises when their absence starts wreaking havoc on ordinary Americans’ lives. …

On Wednesday in The Washington Post, Vice President Mike Pence contrasted his boss’s response to protests in Iran to President Obama’s response in 2009. Obama, he said, had “stayed silent” and “declined to stand with a proud people who sought to escape from under the heavy weight of a dictatorship.” But “under President Trump,” Pence crowed, “the United States is standing with them.” …

If you oppose Donald Trump’s new National Security Strategy, take heart. Apparently, he does too. Fifteen minutes into his speech unveiling the strategy on Tuesday, Trump butchered it in a revealing way. In its fourth paragraph, the strategy declares that the Trump administration will pursue a “strategy of principled realism.” But Trump mangled the phrase, declaring instead that, “Our new strategy is based on a principle, realism.” …