Korean Imbroglio and the Trump Factor

One day in late 2017, after work at the Pentagon, then-US Secretary of Defense James Mattis quietly slipped into the National Cathedral in Washington.

- LEE KYONG-HEE

Mattis directed his security detail to allow him to enter alone so he could pray and reflect.

"What do you do if you've got to do it?" Mattis asked himself. "You're going to incinerate a couple million people." He had been in enough wars to know what one on the Korean Peninsula would entail. Now the question for him was how to fulfill his duty knowing his decisions might have epic consequences.

President Donald Trump's maximum pressure on North Korea included not only draconian economic sanctions but verbal assaults against Kim Jong-un, including "fire and fury" and "nuclear obliteration." Only the president could authorize the use of nuclear weapons, but Mattis believed the decision would rest on his recommendation.

By then, the North Korean leader possessed, for the first time, both nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles that could carry a nuclear warhead to the US homeland. Kim had been launching missiles at an alarming rate during the first year of Trump's presidency, including an unprecedented ICBM on July 4. The North conducted its sixth nuclear test—its most recent one to date—two months later.

In his 2020 book, "Rage," Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward describes Mattis returning to the cathedral several more times that year "to find peace before the moment came." Woodward writes that, when he walked out of his last visit, Mattis had cleared the decks: "I'm ready to go to work. I'm not going to think any more about the human tragedy."