Sunday, October 21, 2018

Obama left a crisis in North Korea that Trump just might be able to clean up

The Dallas Morning News ^ | October 21, 2018 | Claudia Rosett 

Whatever comes next with North Korea, President Donald Trump can hardly be accused of having neglected diplomacy. At the Singapore Summit with Kim Jong Un this past June, Trump became the first sitting American president to meet with a North Korean tyrant. He has received an envoy from Kim in the Oval Office, dispatched Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on multiple trips to Pyongyang and is talking about holding a second summit with Kim.
And, with a trademark rhetorical flourish that no one should take literally, Tump recently described how Kim wrote him "beautiful letters," with the result that "we fell in love, OK?"
There's been plenty of criticism of Trump's diplomacy. For an American president to glad-hand Kim dignifies a dictator whose baggage includes the worst systematic human-rights abuses on the planet. The brief joint statement signed by Trump and Kim on June 12 in Singapore, in which Kim's core commitment was "to work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula," has yet to produce any neat public timetables or detailed text for a plan of action. Most of all, more than five months after the summit, there is no sure sign that Kim is about to surrender a single nuclear bomb, or even stop producing bomb fuel.
All these complaints are valid. But the devil here does not actually reside in the details. The real snare is the hope that Kim, while still ruling over North Korea, can ever be peacefully bargained out of his nuclear arsenal. Kim presides over a totalitarian system structured so pervasively around lies, brutality, terror, out-sized arsenals and international extortion, that there is simply no diplomatic denuclearization deal that he's likely to honor....
(Excerpt) Read more at dallasnews.com ...

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