The world will take Trump literally

The president-elect’s supporters seem convinced that they can divine Trump’s secret messages, but the rest of the world isn’t interested in poring over their amateur Talmudic translations. In the cold, hard power logic of geopolitics, history hangs on the American president’s every word. Being coy or offhand about U.S. security priorities can lead to the kind of miscalculations that have the potential to devolve into cascading cycles of proportionately escalating retaliation. Absent cooler heads, those cycles can spiral out of control.

A president does not have the luxury of imprecise language. Trump’s fans may not take his words seriously, but America’s enemies most certainly will.