Trump's top national security adviser John Bolton recently stated that North Korea's decision to test short-range ballistic missiles violated a United Nations Security Council resolution against such tests.
Bolton followed in the footsteps of the officials in South Korea and Japan who said the same thing, but Trump contradicted all of them over the weekend by shrugging his shoulders at the North's latest weapons test. He 'views it differently,' Trump said.
Now, the State Department is contradicting Trump by saying the test violated UN resolutions.
“I think the entire North Korean WMD program, it’s in conflict with the U.N. Security Council resolutions. But what the U.S. is focused on here ... is in trying to negotiate a peaceful end to the North Korean WMD program,” State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus told reporters.
Ortagus had been asked to make clear the State Department’s position after President Donald Trump appeared to contradict his national security adviser, John Bolton, over whether North Korean launches this month had violated U.N. resolutions.
"Yes, the test violated UN resolutions, but..."
No one can expect coherence from the Trump regime, but this is a bit extra even for them. Allies who want to know what the United States official position is may have no luck finding out what it is. I sure as hell don't know.
If Trump is not interested in enforcing resolutions that are already on the books and agreed to by the likes of Russia and China, what incentive could there possibly be for North Korea to adhere to those resolutions or to new ones?
They're not going to voluntarily play nice if it doesn't really matter.