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Article snippet: WASHINGTON — It was only a few hours after his secretary of state cracked open the door on Thursday to negotiating with the North Koreans that President Trump stepped in with exactly the kind of martial-sounding threats against the country that the White House, until now, had carefully avoided. “There is a chance that we could end up having a major, major conflict with he said to Reuters during a round of his 100-days-in-office commemorations. “Absolutely.” Viewed in the most charitable light, Mr. Trump was, in his own nondiplomatic way, building pressure to force the North to halt its nuclear and missile tests, the first step toward resuming the kind of negotiations that Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson has begun to talk about. If so, the North Koreans did not pick up on the hint: A few hours after Mr. Tillerson told the United Nations Security Council it must vigorously enforce sanctions against the North, Pyongyang launched another missile. Like many before it, the launch failed, leaving open the question of whether an American sabotage program or other causes were responsible. Another possibility is that Mr. Trump was engaging in a bit of the “madman theory” that he and many of his aides reportedly admire about President Richard M. Nixon, who tried to convince Ho Chi Minh, the wily North Vietnamese leader, that he might be crazy enough to drop “the bomb” if they could not find a way to end the Vietnam War. But the most likely explanation is that Mr. Trump,... Link to the full article to read more