How a country treats its allies and its adversaries says everything about what it believes strength means — a question that was already on my mind the night I sat in a movie theater watching "The Brink of War" when news broke.
The film reconstructs the 1986 Reykjavik summit, where President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev spent a tense weekend negotiating over the fate of the world's nuclear arsenals.
The movie is a portrait of an American president who believed peace was earned through strength and credibility because he understood that American reliability was the asset that guaranteed every other negotiation possible.
I checked my phone on the way out and read that President Trump had just ordered the Pentagon to "substantially reduce" the joint military exercises the United States runs each year with South Korea — hours before those drills were set to begin.
Trump’s stated reasons: the cost and Seoul's refusal to help with actions against Iran. He also took the opportunity to note his "very good relationship" with Kim Jong Un, the leader of a nuclear-armed regime still technically at war with the ally whose defense drills he'd just gutted.
The contrast was hard to shake.
Reagan's version of "peace through strength" is often reduced to a slogan. It wasn't. At Reykjavik, he was willing to walk away from a historic deal rather than trade away missile defense, because he believed a president's word — to allies and adversaries alike — had to mean the same thing on a good day as on a bad one.
In the two weeks before Trump gutted the drills meant to deter it, North Korea tested ballistic missiles at least twice — its ninth and tenth launches of the year, part of a pace that includes Kim Jong Un ordering a two-and-a-half-fold increase in missile production back in June.
Pyongyang has said openly that the tests are a protest against the joint exercises, which it calls an invasion rehearsal. The sequence isn't ambiguous: North Korea escalates, and the American response is to scale back the training designed to counter it.
That wasn't a response to reduced danger. It was a response to something else entirely — cost, grievance, a president's stated fondness for a dictator personally.
Kim Jong Un isn't managing a regional standoff on the Korean Peninsula anymore. He's a partner in two wars that are actively threatening American interests. That's who the administration just called "unthreatening and respectful."
Mark Montgomery, a retired Navy rear admiral now at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, has named the pattern directly: "President Trump does not seem to understand that North Korea is part of the 'bad guys' team – a member of the ‘Axis of Aggressors’ alongside Russia, Iran, and China.”
Montgomery went on to say, "Kim Jong Un has backed Putin's illegal war against Ukraine with ammunition, troops, and missiles." And the danger isn't confined to a European battlefield: "North Korea threatens key American allies and trade partners — South Korea and Japan — daily. Kim Jong Un is not America's friend; he cannot be reasoned with, and he won't give up his nuclear weapons."
Pyongyang has sent an estimated 11,000-plus troops to fight for Russia against Ukraine, supplies roughly half of Russia's artillery ammunition, and has shipped ballistic missiles Moscow now fires into Ukrainian cities.
It has spent decades as Iran's missile supplier — the technical lineage of Iran's Shahab and Khorramshahr missiles traces straight back to North Korean designs — and analysts expect that cooperation to deepen now that Iran needs to rebuild what the 2026 war destroyed.
Deterrence is thinning at the same time. The USS George Washington, the Navy's only forward-deployed carrier and until recently on station near the South China Sea, has pulled out of the Indo-Pacific to cover a Middle East gap, leaving the region without a home-based American carrier for the foreseeable future.
Montgomery has also flagged what that gap means in practice: a carrier permanently based in the Indo-Pacific cuts response time to a regional threat by more than two weeks compared to one that must sail in from elsewhere. That's exactly the kind of gap a rival power plans around.
When a president alienates a treaty ally over a war that the ally never signed onto, while publicly courting the goodwill of a regime that is simultaneously arming Russia and rebuilding Iran's missile program — the message isn't fiscal discipline. It's that American commitments are conditional, revocable, and personal to whoever happens to be in the Oval Office.
Reagan walked away from Gorbachev to protect American credibility. This administration is giving away its trustworthiness— to Kim Jong Un, for free.
Lynn Schmidt is a columnist and Editorial Board member with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She holds a master's of science in political science as well as a bachelor's of science in nursing.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a“ Steel Across America” event ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11th attacks on the Ellipse near the White House on Sept. 8, 2026 in Washington, D.C. President Trump welcomed 9/ 11 first responders to the Tunnel to Towers Foundation’ s“ Steel Across America” event featuring a 16,900- pound, 21- foot steel beam recovered.
For Trump, even 9/11 is an opportunity
There was a reason organizers of the 9/11 ceremony in Manhattan told President Trump he could not speak at this year’s memorial service.
A good one, it turns out.
Because in a speech he gave on Tuesday in Washington, he did exactly what they were presumably worried about — he made it about himself.
According to The New York Times, Trump had wanted a speaking role at the service, but the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum, which oversees the site, said no, as they’ve maintained for the past decade-plus that the venue and event should be nonpartisan.
Trump has long used awful tragedies to either puff himself up, trash political opponents, or sell lies to the American people.
He blamed a deadly plane crash at Washington National Airport last year on diversity, equity and inclusion policies. He blamed Puerto Ricans for the devastation they endured after Hurricane Maria in 2017. He reportedly considered withholding disaster relief after the California wildfires based on the way affected regions voted. In an interview on Fox News meant to commemorate the 75th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy, he used the occasion to slam former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi…with graves of the dead behind him.
And now, as we approach the 25th anniversary of what many New Yorkers consider the darkest day in modern history, Trump has done it again.
He told a rambling, nonsensical story — one he’s told before — about going to Ground Zero just after terrorists flew two commercial jets into the twin towers. In the story, which no one has been able to verify, despite multiple attempts, he says firefighters had to carry him out of One Liberty Plaza, also known as the U.S. Steel Building, because they thought it was about to collapse.
As CNN fact checker Daniel Dale notes, there’s no evidence Trump went into this building, especially at a time when NYPD and NYFD had locked down the area. There’s no evidence that building was collapsing — in fact, it was deemed structurally sound and reopened within two months of the attacks. There’s no evidence he was carried out of it by firefighters.
But the lie isn’t even the worst part. Pretend it was all true — why would the leader of our country, and a New Yorker, decide to make that tragic day about himself?
Because that’s who Donald Trump is. He’s a malignant narcissist.
He’s also, incidentally, a terrible and ineffectual president, who’s made ill-fated decisions that he has to keep defending, and there’s nothing he won’t do to make himself look and feel better.
Within the first two minutes of his speech, he was cravenly using 9/11 to justify and promote his dumb war in Iran — two events separated by 25 years and 6,000 miles.
“And I will tell you, we’re right now fighting because we have a certain nation that wanted a nuclear weapon, they were very close to getting it, and now they have no chance at getting it. They will never have a nuclear weapon. Iran will not have a nuclear weapon. And they’ve been punished greatly. As you know, we’ve really taken it to them.”
As a New Yorker who lived through 9/11, still one of the worst days of my life, I’m utterly sickened by Trump’s crass, political, and self-promotional framing of that awful day.
And I’m relieved he won’t be given a platform to do it again on Friday’s anniversary in lower Manhattan.
Because for Trump, everything is his for the taking, and absolutely nothing is sacred.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.