The International Incidents Sparked by Trump's Twitter Feed in 2017

An unscripted moment in foreign affairs can be a dangerous thing, which is why entire bureaucratic apparatuses exist just to avoid them. And even the most on-message president can slip up and cause an international incident, whether it’s Ronald Reagan joking into a hot mic that “we begin bombing [the Soviet Union] in five minutes,” prompting a brief red alert of Soviet forces, or Barack Obama referring to “Polish death camps” and having to apologize for seeming to conflate the occupied Poles with the Nazis.

The more spontaneous interactions a president has, the greater the chances for the dreaded gaffe, which is why the president’s Twitter feed has been known to cause heartburn among U.S. national-security professionals. Trump relies not just on national-security and media-relations teams to craft anodyne public statements, but also on his ability to communicate directly with the world via the internet. But there’s a cost to this freedom. Since he became president in January, some of his tweets have caused his administration legal problems; others have resulted in full-blown diplomatic incidents. In some cases, his Cabinet officials have tried to articulate U.S. policy to allies and adversaries alike, only to be undercut by a conflicting tweet from the president.

Here are some of the