Of course, the best outcome would be for Team US - embodied, for better or for worse, by our current president - to insist on total dismantling of the North Korean nuclear arsenal and missile inventory, as well as a quick and sharp improvement in North Korea's human-rights behavior, and to get North Korean compliance.
It's not likely, though, is it?
Would an unprecedentedly generous package of incentives - lifting of all sanctions, loans, the sending of teams of the best and brightest Western and Japanese and South Korean minds to North Korea to consult with them on how to do development, invitations to upcoming Pacific-Rim economic and regional-stability meetings - increase the likeliness?
My sense is that it still wouldn't get us that best outcome. Kim would consider all the factors, particularly elections in the US and other nations with a stake in the matter, that might prevent US promises from being impeccably reliable.
And such a bargain would be fraught with danger for us. The Kim regime's history of lying and opportunism indicates a strong possibility that nothing would be different this time around.
Then there is, of course, the VSG factor. As we just saw at the G7 meeting, his impulsiveness and boorishness make it impossible to count on him staying a wise course. He's going into this driven by the search for whatever outcome makes him look like a "winner" to those whose respect and adoration he craves.
We'll know within a couple of days what kind of scenario we're looking at going forward.
Let us hope it's not some kind of mushy, vague "framework" that, in reality, would do not one thing to ratchet down the danger level.
Shameful the rhetoric spewed at Trudeau. A special place in hell huh? This is not the campaign trail where wusses like Cruz and Romney kiss up to this bully after repositioning their entrails. And yet the big bully has kind (if again duplicitous) words for leaders of the (former?) enemy. Does Trump own real estate now in hell?
ReplyDeleteHe's quite different from any of his predecessors.
ReplyDeleteOh, only that? That's what his shills groove to. I'm so embarrassed for our country now.
ReplyDeleteThe VIPG (Very Intuitive Psychic Genius) says he'll know within the first minute if NK is serious at the meeting.
ReplyDeleteThis is the reality of the moment. This is what we’re going into this with.
ReplyDeleteDennis Rodman is in Singapore waiting in the wings to help out.
ReplyDeleteI’m embarrassed, too. That’s why I cover his unfitness regularly here at LITD.
ReplyDeleteAnd these sanctions Norkor wants rid of. How much did Trump have to do with them? Where has the UN gone in all this? It will be a sad day of bully diplomacy wins. Bombast will lead to bombs eventually. It will be years, not minutes, for all this to play out. .
ReplyDeletehen candidate Barack Obama said in a 2007 debate that he’d meet with the leaders of rogue states – including North Korea – without preconditions, critics pounced: Fox News host Sean Hannity ripped his “lack of foreign policy expertise” and called the idea “disturbing” and “naïve.” His Democratic primary rival, Hillary Clinton, called him “irresponsible and frankly naïve.”
ReplyDeleteMonths into Obama’s presidency, Republicans ripped him again when he exchanged pleasantries briefly with Hugo Chavez, the late dictator of Venezuela, on the margins of a Latin America summit. One Republican senator called it “irresponsible” for the president to be photographed “laughing and joking” with an anti-American leader like Chavez.
"It was all part of a pattern: Obama would argue that it was more effective to bring even the most hostile and isolated of America’s enemies in from the cold than to constantly threaten them with war, and Republicans would bash him for his supposed naivete. Obama shrugged off the attacks. As he explained his thinking in a 2015 interview with Fareed Zakaria: “You don’t negotiate deals with your friends. You negotiate them with your enemies.”
Obama took the most heat for his outreach to Iran—long perhaps the most cartoonish of American adversaries, with its funding of suicide bombers and chants of ‘Death to America’. Forty-seven GOP senators even sent Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, a letter in 2015 warning him that any deal with Obama over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program might well be oveturned by a future president. Republicans fumed that Obama seemed friendlier to Khamenei than he did to Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister whose vocal opposition to the nuclear talks fueled GOP arguments that the deal was fatally flawed and weak. Often, the very idea of talking with adversaries was painted as inherently soft. Sen Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) was typical when he blasted Obama’s plan for “a nuclear arms control agreement with a sworn enemy.”
Flash forward to today, and what are Republicans saying about the current president’s willingness – eagerness, even – to cut a nuclear deal with the most roguish leader of them all, North Korean strongman Kim Jong Un? Not much—only Lindsey Graham, the relentlessly hawkish South Carolina senator, has been critical of Trump’s overtures to Kim Jong Un, saying he expected Tuesday’s summit to fail. Eighteen House Republicans have even suggested that Trump already merits the Nobel Peace Prize for agreeing to sit down with his North Korean counterpart. And Hannity? He said that Trump’s mere “willingness to meet with North Korea is a huge foreign policy win.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell probably spoke for many Republicans when he gave Trump a mild warning last week: “You have to not want the deal too much. If you fall in love with the deal, and it’s too important for you to get it, and the details become less significant, you could get snookered.”
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/06/11/trump-north-korea-talks-singapore-diplomacy-218674
Exactly. This has all the trappings of MEC-style appeasement, although I doubt that the VSG is capable of any consistent, thought-out agenda, even appeasement.
ReplyDeleteHe's winging it, as he does with everything.
Sad that this showtime is just the thing for his peanut gallery and may get h reelected for doing what me says all previous prexies couldn't as of course there are still suckers born every minute and they are living longer these days.
ReplyDelete