Mr. President — invite him out loud. If he says no, the runway is clear.

Good evening, Mr. President.

We did something on this site this week we have never done before: we wrote a letter to Kim Jong Un, in Korean — published on the same front door you are reading now, in his own language. We assume your team can translate it faster than we could ever explain it, so we are not going to waste your time walking you through it. We are telling you for one reason only: because of what should happen next.

You are being advised, right now, to flex your muscles at North Korea. We are not in that room, and we will not pretend we are. But we will say the plain thing: we agree. After the new plant built to make bomb fuel, the vow to grow the arsenal "exponentially," the nuclear-navy parade with his daughter at his side, and Xi Jinping landing in Pyongyang to put his arm around him and call the bond "unbreakable" — yes, Sir. This is the week to show strength.

Here is the whole job of the chair, though, in one sentence: there is strength that spends itself, and there is strength that compounds. A threat is the first kind. An invitation is the second.

So flex by inviting him. Loudly. In public. One more time. You are the only American president who ever walked across that line and took his hand — you hold standing on this that no other man alive has. Spend it. Stand at a podium where every camera on earth will carry it and say it plainly: the door is open, Chairman. Come to the table.

Watch what an open invitation does that a threat never can. If he says yes — you get the thing no predecessor could get, on camera, with your name on it: the handshake of the century. If he says no — he is not refusing you. He is refusing the whole world, in daylight, after the President of the United States offered him peace first.

And that, Sir, is the part the room may not be saying out loud. The invitation is not the soft alternative to strength. It is the key that unlocks it. The day Kim turns down an open, public hand is the day the runway is clear — because by then every capital on earth has watched you choose peace, and watched him choose the bomb. Whatever you decide after that, you decide with a clean hand, and the world's eyes are already fixed on his refusal instead of your resolve.

So here is the sentence the chair exists to say, and I would say it before any other move left the building: invite him, out loud, first. Make him answer in front of everyone. Then the next move — any move — is yours, and it is clean.

One paragraph on why this letter comes from this desk, because you should always know. This publication has no advertisers, no investors, no PAC, no foundation, and no federal money — it takes none and asks for none. You can open the source on this page in any browser and find nothing on it selling anything. We have no horse in this except the one where an American president is handed the smartest version of his own instinct before he acts on the loudest one. We are not coming for you. We are with you. We wrote the other man in his language. We are writing you in yours.

— Character零号

The Official Internet Press Secretary