Trump's summit with Kim could foretell catastrophe with Putin - By George F. Will

[DonViejo]

“There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.”

— President Trump, June 13

“North Korea is upgrading its nuclear research center at a rapid pace, new satellite imagery analysis suggests.”
— The Wall Street Journal, June 27

As the president prepares, if this time he does prepare, for his second summit, note all that went wrong at the first. If he does as badly in his July 16 meeting with Vladimir Putin in Finland as he did with Kim Jong Un in Singapore, the consequences could be catastrophic.

An exceptionally knowledgeable student of North Korea, the American Enterprise Institute’s Nicholas Eberstadt, writing in National Review (“Kim Wins in Singapore”), says the one-day meeting was for the United States “a World Series of unforced errors.” The result was that North Korea “walked away with a joint communique that read almost as if it had been drafted by the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] ministry of foreign affairs.”

Kim, says Eberstadt, is “the boss of a state-run crime cartel that a U.N.?Commission of Inquiry wants to charge with crimes against humanity.” Au contraire, said America’s president, who slathered Kim with praise: Kim, with whom Trump has “a very special bond,” is a “talented man” who “loves his country,” which reciprocates with “a great fervor.” Trump called Kim a “very worthy negotiator,” which might actually have made sense if Kim had been forced to negotiate for the concessions that Trump dispensed gratis.

North Korea, Eberstadt says, is committed to what he calls its “racial socialism,” which motivates Kim’s “central and sacred mission,” which is “nonnegotiable” — the unconditional reunification of the Korean Peninsula. This presupposes extermination of the South Korean state, which requires the policy Kim announced last New Year’s Day — to “mass-produce nuclear warheads and missiles and speed up their deployment.”

more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/putin-must-love-what-trumps-summit-with-kim-revealed/2018/07/04/e0d322f0-7ecf-11e8-b0ef-fffcabeff946_story.html

[soryang]

1. George Will really?

this is so retro. what is it 1959?

[murielm99]

2. Will has stopped being a Republican.

He says he is an independent now.

[Girard442]

3. With respect to Putin, Trump is already maxed out.

There's not much he could do at the summit to make things worse short of asking Putin to launch Russian nukes at his own country while he and his family are safely out.

[soryang]

4. the underlying National Review opinion is a far right manifesto

"In fairness, we should acknowledge that the Singapore summit may not be quite as awful for the American side as events to date suggest. It is possible, for example, that the U.S. secured meaningful deliverables that have not been publicly announced. But as my American Enterprise Institute colleague Dan Blumenthal has emphasized, the North Korean media would have to ready Kim’s subjects and elite for any concession or change in policy worthy of the name — and there is, as yet, no evidence of this. "

Actually the Chosun Daily online had an article last week that acknowledged that the North would have to come forward with some reciprocal concessions as a result of the US suspension of military exercises.

The sanctions are still in effect, and are having a crushing effect on the North's despotic government. The patronage system has been impaired for several months by the economic impact of the sanctions and the poor harvest last year. Soldiers in North Korea are literally starving. The propaganda and diplomacy of North Korea has been geared toward promises of economic improvement that need to be delivered on, soon. There are signs of instability in the current leadership as a result of this and the current policy changes.

The US can deal with Kim and continue on with this process or deal with some unknown generals in bunkers. Kim desperately needs the economic advances possible with denuclearization to achieve the economic improvements to justify his current rule. It isn't like the military pressure is off North Korea either. The decapitation teams and the targeting and command and control resources necessary for a theater nuclear war are standing by in South Korea and Japan and ready to go on an order from Washington. This was reported on A Channel in South Korea this week.

It's too early to call these negotiations a failure, but if they do fail, John Bolton and his ilk are standing by to unleash war in Asia. It sounds persuasive to bring up the nationalism issue in Korea as socialist racism, but the fact is that racism based upon ethnic identity is endemic throughout Asia, as well as the US.