Saturday roundup

North Korea:

The must-read on this subject is by Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute at National Review:

Given the hopes that President Trump’s North Korea policy had generated in the roughly 18 months leading up to Singapore, the results were little short of shocking. There is no way to sugarcoat it: Kim Jong-un and the North Korean side ran the table. After one-on-one talks with their most dangerous American adversary in decades and high-level deliberations with the “hard-line” Trump team, the North walked away with a joint communiqué that read almost as if it had been drafted by the DPRK ministry of foreign affairs. 

The dimensions of North Korea’s victory in Singapore only seemed to grow in the following days, with new revelations and declarations by the two sides. What remains unclear at this writing is whether the American side fully comprehends the scale of its losses, and how Washington will eventually try to cope with the setbacks the meeting set in motion.

Kim Jong-un’s first and most obvious victory was the legitimation the summit’s pageantry accorded him and his regime. The Dear Respected Leader was treated as if he were the head of a legitimate state and indeed of a world power rather than the boss of a state-run crime cartel that a U.N. Commission of Inquiry wants to charge with crimes against humanity. In addition to the intrinsic photo-op benefit of a face-to-face with an American president who had traveled halfway across the globe to meet him, the Dear Respected Leader bathed in praise from the leader of the free world: Kim Jong-un was “a talented man who loves his country very much,” “a worthy negotiator,” and a person with whom Trump had “developed a very special bond.” Kim even garnered an invitation to the White House. These incalculably valuable gifts went entirely unreciprocated.

Second: Kim was handed a major victory in terms of what went missing from the summit agenda. For the Kim regime’s security infractions are by no means limited to its domestic nuke and missile projects.

As Professor Bruce Bechtol Jr. details in an important forthcoming book, North Korea is a WMD merchant for Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, and other elements in the Middle East, supporting and in turn being supported by an unholy alliance of terror agents abroad. Not unrelated, North Korea maintains immense stockpiles of chemical weapons, as Kim Jong-un’s assassination of his half-brother in a Malaysian airport with nerve agents was certainly intended to remind us. North Korea is also actively involved in cyber warfare and cyber crime, as the Sony hacking and the cyber-robbing of numerous overseas banks attest. DPRK security services routinely abduct foreign nationals — from Japan, South Korea, Europe, and maybe even America — as has been documented by HRNK, the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. And then there is the nightmare of human rights under the regime — a catastrophe unparalleled in the modern world — and its commitment to eradicating the Republic of Korea, a U.N. member state.In getting a pass on all these matters in the official record of its deliberations with Washington, North Korea scored a huge plus. 

Third: Regarding the key issues that were mentioned in the joint statement, the U.S. ended up adopting North Korean code language. 

Until (let’s say) yesterday, the U.S. objective in the North Korean nuclear crisis was to induce the DPRK to dismantle its nuclear armaments and the industrial infrastructure for them. Likewise with long-range missiles. Thus the long-standing U.S. formulation of “CVID”: “complete verifiable irreversible denuclearization.”  But because the nuclear quest is central to DPRK strategy and security, the real, existing North Korean state cannot be expected to acquiesce in CVID — ever. Thus its own alternative formulation, with which America concurred in Singapore: “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”

In this sly formulation, South Korea would also have to “denuclearize” — even though it possesses no nukes and allows none on its soil. How? By cutting its military ties to its nuclear-armed ally, the U.S. And if one probes the meaning of this formulation further with North Korean interlocutors, one finds that even in this unlikely scenario, the DPRK would treat its “denuclearization” as a question of arms control — as in, if America agrees to drawing down to just 40 nukes, Pyongyang could think about doing the same. The language of “denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” ensured that no tangible progress on CVID was promised in the joint statement.

Likewise the communiqué’s curious North Korean–style language about agreeing to build a “peace regime” on the Korean Peninsula. What is the difference between a “peace regime” and plain old “peace,” or, say, a peace treaty among all concerned parties? From the North Korean standpoint, a “peace regime” will not be in place until U.S. troops and defense guarantees are gone — and a peace treaty between North and South may not be part of a “peace regime,” either, because that would require the DPRK to recognize the right of the ROK to exist, a proposition it has always rejected.

Fourth: The North delivered absolutely nothing on the American wish list at the summit and offered only the vaguest of indications about any deliverables in the future. No accounting of the current nuke and missile inventory. No accounting of the defense infrastructure currently mass-producing nukes and missiles. No accounting of WMD sales and services in the Middle East, or cyber-crime activities, or counterfeiting, or drug sales. Not even a small goodwill gesture, such as the release of Japanese abductees or an admission that North Korean agents did indeed kidnap David Sneddon, a young American last seen in China, as many who have followed the case believe.Nor did Team Trump’s much-vaunted timetable for handing over nukes and dismantling WMD facilities emerge. Quite the contrary: As Bruce Klingner of the Heritage Foundation and others have pointed out, the joint language commits North Korea to even less than any of its previous (flagrantly violated) nuclear agreements did: less than its agreements with South Korea in 1991 and 1992; less than its Agreed Framework in 1994; less even than the miserable Joint Statement from the so-called Six-Party Talks in 2005. 

Mona Charen's Ricochet piece, "Historic Snooker," from a few days ago is worth your while as well:

Why is our president smiling? You can always argue that democratic leaders must treat with dictators and even villains of various stripes for the sake of winning a war or securing the peace. You can even argue that sometimes presidents flatter unsavory leaders to build trust and ease tensions. But no historical comparisons can illuminate Trump’s ricochets between hysterical threats (“fire and fury”) and pusillanimous praise (“very talented”) without any substantive change on the part of the dictator. What has changed since the State of the Union address in which Trump honored the memory of Otto Warmbier and detailed the atrocities of the North Korean regime? In gratitude for the exchange of pleasantries, the release of a few hostages, and vague offers of “denuclearization” Trump has made himself Kim’s doormat.

As a matter of substance, the Singapore summit achieved less than nothing. It was a profound defeat for U.S. world influence and for democratic decency, arguably the worst summit outcome since Yalta. Kim promised to consider “denuclearization,” exactly as his father and grandfather had done repeatedly over the past several decades – breaking their promises each and every time. For this puff of cotton candy, Trump agreed to halt “U.S. war games” (using the North Korean term for joint military exercises with South Korea) which Trump himself called provocative! He invited Kim to the White House. He also issued the risible tweet announcing, ahem, peace in our time: “There is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea. 

It’s difficult to determine just how stupid Trump thinks the American people are. But there is no question that Trump’s affection for strongmen and thugs, evident before in his praise of the Chinese murderers of Tiananmen, and his warm words for Putin, Duterte, and Xi, has now extended to the worst tyrant/killer on the planet. Trump did far more than overlook Kim’s atrocious human rights abuses, he became Kim’s PR man. “he’s a very talented man and I also learned he loves his country very much.” He has a “great personality” and is “very smart.”

Trump granted Kim’s legitimacy: “His country does love him. His people, you see the fervor. They have a great fervor.”

In 2014, a United Nations report concluded that North Korea’s crimes against humanity “entail extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation.”

What of all that? Trump is understanding, even impressed. “Hey, he’s a tough guy. When you take over a country — a tough country, tough people — and you take it over from your father, I don’t care who you are, what you are, how much of an advantage you have. If you can do that at 27 years old, I mean, that’s one in 10,000 that could do that. So he’s a very smart guy. He’s a great negotiator.”

What was Trump’s chief argument in 2016? The U.S. had been the victim of “bad deals,” with other countries and he was the great deal maker. He fingered the Iran deal as the worst deal in history. His defenders will excuse the truckling to Kim as a clever gambit to extract concessions. But Kim has offered absolutely nothing. All of the concessions have come from the United States, including the most crucial one – we’ve put ourselves on the same moral plane as North Korea. That’s what Make America Great Again has achieved.

The Border Crisis:

Heather MacDonald at City Journal gets to the heart of the matter:

Underlying this episode were several cardinal principles of left-wing activism: that favored victim groups must never be held responsible for their actions, and that policy should be made based on immediate claims of need, with no regard to long-term consequences. The reigning assumption during the family-separation meltdown was that the adults who brought children with them across the border had no responsibility for their subsequent plight. The only actor with agency was the federal government; it alone bore the blame for alien minors being placed in detention facilities. Yet the but-for cause of the child separation was the adult’s decision to cross illegally into the U.S., child in tow. If you don’t want to be separated from your or another person’s child, don’t cross the border illegally. Likewise, any whisper of immigration enforcement inside the border is inevitably greeted with cries that such enforcement would cause illegal aliens to be “fearful.” If you don’t want to fear deportation, don’t assume the risk of deportation, however slight that risk may be, by illegal entry.

Obeying the law, however, is something that must never be demanded of politically correct victims. If lawbreaking carries negative consequences, the fault lies with the legal system, not with an individual’s decision to break the law in the first place.

This principle is at work in the ongoing attacks on the criminal-justice system as well: the overrepresentation of blacks in prison is attributed to allegedly racist actors and institutions, not to lawbreaking by the criminals. Non-legal forms of distress are also covered by the no-agency rule. If single mothers experience elevated rates of poverty, the fault lies with a heartless welfare system, not with their decision to conceive a child out-of-wedlock. The father, of course, is as good as nonexistent, in the eyes of the single-mother welfare lobby. If teen mothers are stressed out, the problem lies in the absence of daycare centers in high schools.

The “progressive” solution to these dilemmas is to confer an immediate benefit on the alleged victim that will alleviate the problem in the short term, perverse incentives be damned. Illegal aliens with children must be exempt from immigration rules. The likelihood that such a policy will encourage more illegal aliens to come is out of sight, out of mind (if not covertly viewed as an affirmative good). If having more out-of-wedlock children puts a strain on a single mother’s welfare check and food stamps, then the government should increase the allotment to reflect the additional births. If that single mother and her children show up at a shelter claiming homelessness, give them an apartment. If such free housing encourages more single mothers to flood the shelter system, contract for more apartments.

Also check out Rich Lowry's latest column, entitled "Dems' True Goal Is To End All Border Enforcement," which has appeared in the New York Post as well as Jewish World Review.

Post-America's Crumbling Civility:

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders tweets about her attempt to patronize a restaurant:

Last night I was told by the owner of Red Hen in Lexington, VA to leave because I work for @POTUS and I politely left. Her actions say far more about her than about me. I always do my best to treat people, including those I disagree with, respectfully and will continue to do so

A Facebook friend of mine (he's a buddy in the offline world as well) reports that our societal brittleness has reduced his longstanding friendships by one:

Well today it happened. I was called by one of my old friends "one of the biggest pieces of shit" that he knows, and asked me to unfriend him.
Why you may ask?
For presenting and defending conservative points of view.

Sad times my brethren, sad times. 

You probably know about Nikki Haley announcing that the US was pulling out of the UN Human Rights Council. (It probably should have been noted and celebrated here at LITD; it's been a busy week.) Since then, she's had the opportunity to demonstrate why it was an excellent move. 

Future first female POTUS Nikki Haley is exactly right. In the same week that saw Ms. Haley deliver a blistering “Dear John” letter to the UN “Human Rights” Council, the alleged watchdog group also had the pleasure of enduring her entirely justified clapback wrath at their new report scrutinizing US poverty. The “Human Rights” Council, which includes Afghanistan, China, and Cuba, condemned the US for lowering tax rates on rich people and curbing certain programs for poor citizens. This, despite the fact noted by Haley that the US currently has its lowest unemployment rate in decades.

The Council, which includes Iraq, Pakistan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was set to present the report Friday, which was drafted by Philip Alston, a man who left his home country of Australia and took a high-paying seat as a law professor in the United States of America at New York University. Haley lambasted the apparently non-satirical report as “misleading and politically motivated” (also, water is wet).

Haley added:

It is patently ridiculous for the United Nations to examine poverty in America. In our country, the President, Members of Congress, Governors, Mayors, and City Council members actively engage on poverty issues every day. Compare that to the many countries around the world, whose governments knowingly abuse human rights and cause pain and suffering.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, a socialist democratic socialist, defended the report against his own country, calling the scathing examination “totally appropriate”. Specifically, he highlighted the 40 million who still live in poverty* (defined by the Census Bureau’s mobile goalpost as $25,100/yr for a family of four--roughly the average salary of Poland or Greece) and the 30 million who do not carry health insurance since they are no longer forced by the federal government to buy any (this of course leaves poor citizens with no medical recourse other than the full coverage already provided for them by Medicaid). Sen. Sanders’ criticism of US wages was a scorching indictment of the nation listed as having the 2nd highest average salaries in the world after Luxembourg according to the OECD. No doubt this will only bolster the credibility of the findings of the “Human Rights” Council, which includes Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, and Venezuela. 

Another must-read this weekend: Kristen Soltis Anderson's Washington Examiner piece, "The Four Species of Beltway Republicans."  She categorizes them as the Trump enthusiasts, the establishmentarians, the internal opposition, and the remnant.