Wednesday, May 16, 2018

Wait a minute; wasn't "denuclearization" the intent of the summit?

It turns out that North Korea's feathers are ruffled over more than the joint US- South Korean drills:

Donald Trump’s historic meeting with Kim Jong-un has been thrown into uncertainty as North Korea warned it could be cancelled over US military exercises and if Washington presses ahead with its one-sided demand for Pyongyang to give up its nuclear arsenal.
Kim Kye-gwan, North Korea's deputy foreign minister, warned on Wednesday that Pyongyang was not interested in talks that would pressure the rogue state to "unilaterally" give up its nuclear programme, taking aim at "unbridled remarks" by John

Bolton, the US national security adviser, and other high-ranking White House officials.
In a statement issued by the North Korean Central News Agency [KCNA], Mr Kim took issue in particular with Mr Bolton's references to the so-called Libya model of nuclear abandonment and his statements on "complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearisation."
Mr Kim claimed the remarks cast doubt on America's sincerity, underlining that his country was not Libya, which met a "miserable fate." 
Well, Mr. Kim, internal stability is your situation to handle. Your country doesn't have to turn out like Libya. Yes, the US pushed for his ouster, but that was in the context of the Arab Spring (a phenomenon that yielded decidedly mixed results). It seems like a safe bet that the US and indeed "the international community" would be so thrilled, given the exponentially greater degree of your bellicosity that it would work closely with you to facilitate joining that community,

This stage - the beginnings of an unraveling - doesn't surprise me at all. I thought there was less to the abrupt turn about than meets the eye.

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