Trump's confidence over North Korea and Iran relations is proving naive

Donald Trump entered the new year facing flare-ups of long-burning crises with two old adversaries –​ Iran and North Korea – which are directly challenging his claim to have reasserted American power around the world. While the Iranian-backed attack on the US Embassy in Baghdad seemed to be under control, it played to Mr Trump’s longtime worry that American diplomats and troops in the Middle East are easy targets and his longtime position that the United States must pull back from the region. In North Korea, Kim Jong-un’s declaration on Wednesday that the world would “witness a new strategic weapon” seemed to be the end of an 18-month experiment in which Mr Trump believed his force of...