U.S. President Donald Trump's latest tweet telling Iran it would suffer "consequences the likes of which few throughout history have ever suffered before" is an almost-verbatim rehash of his August 2017 threat to North Korea; then, Trump promised "fire, fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before." It's about as serious this time around, but there's more bad blood behind Trump's deployment of all caps against Iran.
Trump's tweet is a response to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's speech on Sunday, in which Rouhani warned the U.S. president not to "twist the lion's tail." "The Americans," Rouhani said, "need to realize that making peace with Iran is the mother of all peaces and waging war against Iran is the mother of all wars."
Rouhani, of course, wasn't threatening to attack the U.S. but warning it against attacking Iran. The rhetoric is not particularly different from North Korea's, if more hollow: Iran, unlike North Korea, has no nuclear weapons and there's no way it can hold off the United States' conventional military might. But the Iranians make Trump madder than North Korean leader Kim Jong Un — not because they are more dangerous but because they refuse to play along with him.