Note the South Korean President's quote. This puts the prior 4 administrations to shame for their feckless efforts.
Feckless?!?!? (And I should point out my phone tried to autocorrect that word to fucked, which is more appropriate.) NK has had one goal since partition, and that is to be treated as a coequal in the community of nations. The reason every competent president has insisted on multi lateral talks isn't just because we need buy in from their only real trading partner (China), but because we have been unwilling to dignify their undignified regime. What this says to Kim is that his nuclear investment worked. He got the one thing his father and grandfather could not: a bilateral meeting with the US. Even if it falls through, he has that propaganda for his state TV. This is not something to celebrate. This is a signal to all rogue regimes that non proliferation is a scam, and that if they agree to it they lose leverage. I'm deeply troubled this morning. For all Trump's incoherence and incompetence, this might take the cake. And that is a long list, because since he's been inaugurated, Turkey and China have confirmed dictators for life, Russia has not been held to account for a direct assault on America, the EU and Canada have threatened punitive trade actions against America, and on and on. This isn't just bad foreign policy; it's a sea change of America-as-leader. You need to wake up to your blind allegiance to the Republican party. This is not Republicanism. Full stop.
Right. Right. KJU is not going to give up nuclear capabilities in a negotiation that, from his perspective, was leveraged to even occur because of the existence of his nuclear capabilities.What this says to Kim is that his nuclear investment worked.
This is a signal to all rogue regimes that non proliferation is a scam, and that if they agree to it they lose leverage.
A sitting president of the United States has never met with North Korea because American policy since the armistice of 1953 has been to regard it as a rogue regime. Regardless, prior administrations coordinated aid, monitoring and investigations until the relationship broke down in 2002 (11 months after Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech). Trump is not the first President to be asked to meet as equals. He's the first to agree. He's also the first to suggest that war with/over North Korea would be a good idea. Clinton had a nuclear freeze and regular inspections. Obama had a moratorium on missile tests. Trump? Trump's the president North Korea threatened with a "strike to the heart". I'm not sure we agree on the definition of "feckless."
Clinton got them to sign the Agreed Framework which held until Bush called them the Axis of Evil. That kept them at "have refined yellowcake" but no further. Three years after the breakdown of the Agreed Framework, they tested a nuclear weapon.
John Dean, Nixon's Lawyer It hadn't occurred to me that a man impressed by French military parades might soon have a North Korean military parade in front of him, in his honor.This is not a “Nixon to China” moment. Trump is playing way out of his league and the world knows it. Kim knows it. Much can go very wrong and Trump won’t read a briefing book. Going to be interesting— and extremely dangerous. Kim will give him a parade and have his mind/heart.
Once again, Trump is easily manipulated by a foreign power into doing something stupid. NK is not a legitimate country, in any sense of the word. They are artificially propped up by "secret" supply lines of cash and food from China and Russia, who both fear what happens if someone OTHER than the ruling party gets control of NKs weapons. NK has been DESPERATE for legitimacy. They have been groveling and whimpering for recognition by anyone other than their smuggling contacts. And now, in one year, they got the biggest superpower on the planet to agree to FACE TO FACE TALKS between their supreme leaders, AND got to pretend they haven't been threatening to kill their southern neighbors for 50 years, and participate as "Korea" at the Olympics!! This is like that guy hustling his rap CDs on the corner downtown... and David Geffen says, "Hey man, come up to my office. I wanna cut a record with you." Or like the head of the Zetas cartel getting an invite to the White House. They have nothing to offer, and everything to gain from a photo op in the Oval Office shaking Trumplestiltskin's hand. Trump has, yet again, been manipulated. Example: Trump and Kim meet. Trump tells him to stop building nuclear weapons. Kim says No. What then? Kim has just elevated NK to a world power, with a single word. And there ain't dick Trump can do about it. Because we have wargamed an invasion of North Korea, and we update those projections annually. And it NEVER comes out well for anyone, and the knock-on effects (open conflict between Russia and China - who share a 4000 kilometer border, massive death tolls up and down the Korean peninsula, collateral damage throughout Japan and SE Asia, and potential fatalities up and down the west coast of America, not to mention that Tibet gets their chance to fight China while China is busy with Russia, and a single rogue bullet from that conflict ignites the long-simmering India/Pakistan war that has been brewing for a lifetime now)... Trump has truly stuck his dick in crazy this time, and there is NO exit strategy where we come out on top.
Trump might meet with him. Since Kim presumably respects his intelligence apparatus he will flatter Trump because he's an insecure man-child. Trump will be tickled and Tweet about tremendous success. North Korea will get some aid. And it'll do absolutely nothing to dismantle its arsenal. C'mon? They prioritize nuclear weapons over agriculture. They aren't giving them up. And why would they if they can have them and get what they want from a useful idiot. It might be a black box country but I think it's safe to assume the box has people in charge who are smarter than Trump. Who is a very simple man. Hell, he might even have some women pee on a bad while he's there in exchange for some animal protein imports.
A Machiavellian would encourage their ambitions. Freeman Dyson pointed out that Hitler spent more on the V-weapons program than the US spent on the Manhattan Project but Hitler's rockets were strategically insignificant and militarily useless. Had he spent the effort on the Luftwaffe outcomes would have been different. It's entirely possible that North Korea is at the table because they've spent themselves into the ground. Famine got inspectors in there last time. They might simply be skint.
That might explain why NK is at the table, but it sure doesn't explain why we are. We apparently didn't even probe what concessions we could have extracted for even agreeing to explore the idea of bilateral talks. Trump is quite possibly the worst negotiator that has ever had a say in US foreign policy. And when you compare his negotiation skills with his own assessment of his negotiation skills, I think you might break the Dunning-Kruger scale. Bush made the comment "He makes me look pretty good" before this latest fuckup.It's entirely possible that North Korea is at the table because they've spent themselves into the ground.
Was that a rhetorical question? That was a rhetorical question. In the land of Trump negotiation, you can - 1) Refuse to pay and find another sucker 2) Go bankrupt and beg to another bank 3) Move on to other things and sue anybody left over at your failures If the goal is "have a small pile of the large fortune you were born with" Trump is a hell of a negotiator. The problem is we're all living his failed business venture.That might explain why NK is at the table, but it sure doesn't explain why we are.
Trump is quite possibly the worst negotiator that has ever had a say in US foreign policy.
And when you compare his negotiation skills with his own assessment of his negotiation skills, I think you might break the Dunning-Kruger scale.
Our interests for the past ten years have been represented by this guy: I'm not a fan of Taleb, but Trump is a foreign policy Black Swan. If you had told me ten years ago that North Korea would be negotiating with Dennis Rodman and Donald Trump, I would have been unsurprised. If you had told me one of them had the launch codes, I would not have believed you.
My concern is that the North Koreans will play Trump like a cheap fiddle. Don't forget too that Russia and NK are quite cozy on nuclear tech.
The President has a track record of agreeing with whatever the last person to talk to him said. I don't really like where this is going.
RAND has argued that the way forward on North Korea is amnesty for the intelligentsia and aristocracy so that the whole country can be reintegrated. Their model is German reunification which is to Korean unification what a shot glass is to a Big Gulp but hey, beats foxhole-to-foxhole trench warfare.
What was the previous (presumably NOT feckless) “giant step”? Is the moral of the story that we should all threaten nuclear holocaust more often? It’s entirely possible that Kim didn’t feel like he had a bargaining chip until roundabouts now. Or that he’s bluffing. Although this definitely looks like progress, I’m hesitant to chalk it up as a win for Trump yet. And not just because I abhor him, although that’s definitely part of it, not gonna lie (neither will my post history).
Kim just found a weak-minded, impulsive, and petty man-child. And baited him. He has managed to, in one deft move, legitimize North Korea, and bring this backward, fucked up country into the elite club of "world leaders". By poking at Trump's vanity. NK has wanted this for DECADES. But other US Presidents were savvy at negotiation, or at least had savvy advisors. There is a reason, after all, that diplomats and embassies exist. They do the base negotiations, and drag the other country around to a reasonable stance on common issues, BEFORE you bring in the executives to sign the final paper. You don't get to that table without doing the hard work, first. Unless, of course, you tweet at Trump.
I think this underestimates the North Korean approach. The past year has been provocation to see what we'd do and from a clear-eyed foreign policy perspective, the answer has been "nothing." North Korea then met with South Korea without any involvement from us - I think that's a new thing under the sun, too. North Korea had nothing to lose from telling the South Koreans "hey, we'd love to meet with the US as equals" and South Korea has nothing to lose from passing along the message. The meeting doesn't even have to happen now - Trump could walk it back for any reason whatsoever and now we're the problem. Fundamentally, North Korea has been exploring just how dire our foreign policy situation truly is. And, because our foreign policy situation is dictated by Fox & Friends, North Korea has been slotted into the hole that used to be filled by the USSR. North Korea had nothing to lose and everything to gain so why not get invited to the White House? I mean, what if we agreed?Kim just found a weak-minded, impulsive, and petty man-child. And baited him.
I've been thinking about this comment all weekend, and I think I know what I don't like about it, and I italicized it. With Trump's general abdication of all foreign policy positions that the US has lead for the last 50 years, South Korea saw that they were no longer beholden to the US's terms of engagement, and that if anything were going to happen, they had to take the lead. The Olympics were the perfect opportunity to step out of the US's shadow, and become the Lead Negotiator in driving a new relationship with NK and KJU. Countries are no longer burdened by worrying about what the US may think about their actions, and how we may interpret their efforts, diplomatically, because our diplomatic corps has been decimated, and Trump has no understanding of the world markets or political scene. He also has no more advisors on staff who have any understanding of the world outside of a narrow, 200-mile wide band, extending from about W 148th in Manhattan in the north, to Norfolk, VA in the south. (Mar a Lago is obviously on an island somewhere in the Caribbean, to these people.) Trump has effectively eliminated the US's "soft power", world-wide, and SK's direct conciliatory moves towards NK are proof positive of that. If Clinton were President, this could not have happened. Diplomats would have talked back-channel, and NK would have been consistently shitty about their failure to adhere to the terms of any prior agreements, and the diplomats would have been forced to say, "Sorry. No talks with the Prez, then. You are clearly not interested in reaching a deal, because you have already failed to live up to your previous commitments, so why should we open talks with you again? You are just going to lie again." And ... wait ... did I just argue that the diplomacy we have practiced ever since the end of WWII is no longer relevant today, and we should just start with a clean slate with all the Bad Actors in the world, and try again with their new management?!? Hm. That would mean I think that - in the long run - Trump did something good. I'ma gonna have to go sit with that uncomfortable thought for a bit... eeewwwww .... I think this underestimates the North Korean approach. The past year has been provocation to see what we'd do and from a clear-eyed foreign policy perspective, the answer has been "nothing." North Korea then met with South Korea without any involvement from us - I think that's a new thing under the sun, too.
Nope, you didn't. You just argued that if you can't deal with inferiors as inferiors, try treating them as equals. b_b points out above that this is basically the US giving up on North Korea and caving to their demands. A regime that makes Nazi Germany look humanitarian. A criminal enterprise run like a cult. A starvation engine hell-bent on total control of its population. And we just gave 'em a status bump to "outfits we negotiate as equals with." We had regular UN inspections under Clinton. In fact, when shit went sideways under Bush, North Korea asked for their Clinton-era team (Sig Hecker and Bill Richardson). We had a shit-ton of humanitarian aid flood in in response to the great North Korean famine. And then Bush fucked it all up and now they have a nuclear program. And a missile program. No agricultural programs, no civil programs. They're burning everything they got to look impressive. Kim was eliminating rivals at a pace unseen in the history of North Korea - usually not a sign of stability. You don't wipe nerve gas on your brother's nose when you're comfortable in your position as ruler. But now? Now he's invited himself to talks.And ... wait ... did I just argue that the diplomacy we have practiced ever since the end of WWII is no longer relevant today, and we should just start with a clean slate with all the Bad Actors in the world, and try again with their new management?!?