Global observers with even the vaguest interest in the rogue peninsular understand these types of basic details about North Korea. US president Donald Trump, however, may not. Asked by Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt on April 17 whether he has ruled out a military strike on Pyongyang, Trump repeatedly referred to North Korea’s leader as “this gentleman”—and implied he was dealing with the same “gentleman” that former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had grappled with:

“You know, they’ve been talking with this gentleman for a long time. You read Clinton’s book, he said, ‘Oh, we made such a great peace deal,’ and it was a joke. You look at different things over the years with President Obama. Everybody has been outplayed, they’ve all been outplayed by this gentleman. And we’ll see what happens. But I just don’t telegraph my moves.”

Unfortunately for Trump, the “gentleman” Clinton was talking to during his presidency was in fact Kim Jong-il—the now-deceased father of Kim Jong-un.

“The weak illegal immigration policies of the Obama Admin. allowed bad MS 13 gangs to form in cities across U.S. We are removing them fast!” the president wrote on Twitter at about 5:40 a.m.

The MS-13 gang, which is based in Central America, was formed by Salvadorans fleeing that country’s civil war in the 1980s. The FBI recognized that the gang was a growing threat in the early 2000s — before former President Barack Obama was elected — and in 2004 created a task force “to investigate this violent international street gang,” according to the FBI. In 2008, the FBI stated that MS-13 had expanded to at least 42 states and Washington, D.C.

Just over a week ago, the White House declared that ordering an American aircraft carrier into the Sea of Japan would send a powerful deterrent signal to North Korea and give President Trump more options in responding to the North’s provocative behavior. “We’re sending an armada,” Mr. Trump said to Fox News last Tuesday afternoon.

The problem was that the carrier, the Carl Vinson, and the three other warships in its strike force were that very moment sailing in the opposite direction, to take part in joint exercises with the Australian Navy in the Indian Ocean, 3,500 miles southwest of the Korean Peninsula.

White House officials said Tuesday that they had been relying on guidance from the Defense Department. Officials there described a glitch-ridden sequence of events, from an ill-timed announcement of the deployment by the military’s Pacific Command to a partially erroneous explanation by the defense secretary, Jim Mattis — all of which perpetuated the false narrative that a flotilla was racing toward the waters off North Korea.

By the time the White House was asked about the Carl Vinson, its imminent arrival had been emblazoned on front pages across East Asia, fanning fears that Mr. Trump was considering a pre-emptive military strike. It was portrayed as further evidence of the president’s muscular style days after he ordered a missile strike on Syria that came while he and President Xi Jinping of China chatted over dessert during a meeting in Florida.

Given the threats emanating from the DPRK—above all, the nuclear ones—it’s not surprising that our Intelligence Community devotes significant resources to trying to figure out what’s going on in that hermit kingdom. But that’s extraordinarily difficult in practice. IC professionals wanting an easy job avoid North Korea, since making accurate predictions there can be dangerous. This, after all, is a country that might do anything.

(snip)

Therefore, we face the dangerous situation where North Korea, a rogue regime possessing nuclear weapons and no shortage of aggression, remains a black hole for American intelligence. For decades, the IC has tried hard to get information to help our decision-makers in Washington deal more effectively with Pyongyang, yet time and again we’ve been surprised by North Korea’s latest gambit. As the stakes of this game are getting higher, with increased nuclear saber-rattling, the risks of missteps are too.