automatically create taxonomy with same name as post title

Question

I have a custom post type called "Country Story". The title of which will be the name of the country. I want Wordpress to automatically create a new taxonomy called "country" of the same name, i.e. a Country Story called Thailand is created, so I want WP to create a Country taxonomy called Thailand as well. The Country taxonomy already setup. I have the code below so far. It does what I want except I don't know how to get the title during the action hook for publishing the post to pass on to the $cat variable. Can anyone help?

function add_country_category_automatically($post_ID) {
global $wpdb;
if(!has_term('','country',$post_ID)){
    $cat = "get title of Country Story published to pass on to Country category";
    wp_set_object_terms($post_ID, $cat, 'country');
}
}
add_action('publish_country-story', 'add_country_category_automatically');

Answer 1

Can you not just call get_the_title() to get the title of the Country Story?

$cat = get_the_title($post_ID);

Answer 2

Pretty clever solution, i've been searching about 2 days for this. user716816 you might have figured this out already but while your code creates a new term for the given taxonomy when the post is created, it also assigns the new taxonomy term to the new post. If you add another wp_set_object_terms but this time with NULL it will remove the newly created term from the post but keep the term as you initially intended. Anyway i see this post is since 2011 but i thought it would be helpful to share for others that might be looking on this:

function add_country_category_automatically($post_ID) {
global $wpdb;
if(!has_term('','country',$post_ID)){
    $cat = "get title of Country Story published to pass on to Country category";
    wp_set_object_terms($post_ID, $cat, 'country');
    wp_set_object_terms($post_ID, NULL, 'country');
}
}
add_action('publish_country-story', 'add_country_category_automatically');