Posted on 05/25/2018 9:06:53 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
It’s not exactly Donald Trump’s Reykjavik, but he has done the right thing by calling off the misconceived summit with Kim Jong-un.
The North Koreans have been yanking our chain over the last week or so, presumably trying to establish their leverage and begin a negotiation over the negotiation. They seemed to make some progress, with Trump saying the other day that maybe we could settle for something short of complete, verifiable denuclearization, which is supposed to be our core demand. The president may have tempted the North Koreans into the gamesmanship by occasionally seeming over-eager to take credit for a stupendous diplomatic success (stripping North Korea of its nukes) that hadn’t happened yet and is unlikely to happen.
On the other hand, unpredictability is a typical North Korean negotiating tactic, so the sudden shift from warmth and sunshine to blustery demands and threats shouldn’t have been unexpected.
It was always far-fetched that the North would be willing to give up its nuclear weapons. For Pyongyang, the value of a summit wouldn’t be the opportunity for a good-faith negotiation at the highest levels but the chance to use a superficially successful meeting to unravel the sanctions against it, the way it has in the past.
President Trump says there’s still the chance of a summit at some point. It’d be better to give up hopes for a splashy meeting and instead double down on the maximum pressure campaign. There’s still room to tighten up further by, for instance, cracking down on the regime’s illicit sources of cash and imposing secondary sanctions on Chinese entities dealing with the North. The longer-term goal would be to crack the regime, or at least its will.
It’s nice to believe that the North can be defanged easily and quickly at a headline-generating summit. But realism says otherwise. The United States shouldn’t, yet again, let the North Koreans play scorpion to our frog.
RE: ‘The North Korean summit should stay canceled because we don’t want any successes for Trump’.
Actually, I don’t see that point being argued in this article at all.
NR can’t stand the thought of a major Trump success any more than Nancy P. or Chrissy Mathews can.
No. I think Trump made the right move.
What I disagree with is NR’s premise that the summit should be PERMANENTLY cancelled.
See, I am wise to NR’s game plan; which is, and always has been, the failure of the Trump presidency - just as they attempted to sabotage his candidacy.
RE: I am wise to NR’s game plan; which is, and always has been, the failure of the Trump presidency
I do not see how suggesting a permanent cancellation of the summit because Kim Jong Un cannot be trusted is related to a Trump failure.
You may disagree with their premise ( i.e. Kim is not dealing in good faith ), but to say that this then equates to a Trump failure does not compute.
If you accept their “Kim is untrustworthy” premise, then having a summit is pretty much useless.
My post was related to NR sponsored cruises. Avoid those!
National Review gleefully jumps on any thing they can spin as a Trump failure. Obviously they are on the wrong side of history again.
North Koreans paid off the National Review....
Trump tweet: Funny to watch the Democrats criticize Trade Deals being negotiated by me when they don’t even know what the deals are and when for 8 years the Obama Administration did NOTHING on trade except let other countries rip off the United States. Lost almost $800 Billion/year under “O”
National Review seems a lot like the Democrats sometimes.
RE: North Korea paid off the National Review
A very counter intuitive remark. Thr Norks are the ones eager to come back to the table. So how does paying off a publication that recommends the OPPOSITE of getting together help?
I read the article link you posted. The author David Harsanyi has been defending
Trump against Mueller.
Rich Lowry hasn’t been anti Trump in his latest columns either. Dredging up the past and ignoring this particular column does not help your case either.
RE: Now are you going to whine about this post too?
Actually, I’m going to ask you to explain your remark. I’m waiting....
I would like to offer a different idea regarding N. Korea and how Trump is handling this.
The wide spread media narrative coming from both Leftist and Conservatives is that Trump’s goal is the complete denuclearization of N. Korea.
I would offer that Trump’s real goal is a step towards the De-Communization of N. Korea.
Rocket man would get filthy rich and his people would no longer be starving and imprisoned.
We get a new market to sell sh*t and build stuff.
Un gets rich and can adopt a model that mirrors what Xi Jinping is doing in China.
Trump was right to make the meeting. He was right to cancel it after NK stood up our people in Singapore. Now NK realizes they miscalculated and are being conciliatory. So yes, if Trump reschedules it, good. It’s all about sticks and carrots. So far Trump has gotten all the concessions and made none.
OK, I only casually read the excerpts. Sorry for flying off the handle about Lowry and National Review.
But the guy has trained me to believe he and his publication cannot be trusted to tout anything but anti-Trump.
OK, thanks for this knowledge or Buckley. Sounds like what you’re saying is Buckley was another George Will.
If so, I now know why he had a television program so long — the progressives could tolerate him as a odd-ball intellectual knowing he wasn’t too far from their positions.
NOTE: I posted a story about Michael Savage a couple days ago and most of the comments were negative about him.
This disturbs me because he is one of the true Donald Trump commentators.
If you bothered to read the National Review, you will quickly find out that this publication is not a monolith.
They have authors that both support and are critical of Trump. This, I believe is a good thing, and what a vibrant press should be all about.
I hear what you’re saying, but I remember that story during the 2016 campaign when Thomas Sowell compared Trump to Hitler and Mussolini.
For a man who made a career out of economic studies to not recognize that Trump was one of the greatest entrepreneurs of the modern era truly escapes me.
So these things stay in the memory.
RE: Thomas Sowell compared Trump to Hitler and Mussolini.
Could you provide the exact quote or the link? I want to read what he wrote IN CONTEXT.
Sowell did not call Trump Hitler. I was mistaken: he did not mention Mussolini. However, the word associations Sowell made were pretty incendiary:
But is that enough? It has been enough politically to put some of the great demagogues of history in power, especially after the existing establishment has discredited itself.
The discredited Weimar Republic in Germany was vulnerable to the verbal attacks by Adolf Hitler that brought him to power. Now we know, too late, that Hitler turned out to be a bigger catastrophe — for Germany and the world — than the Weimar Republic.
Donald Trump is not an evil man like Hitler. But his headstrong shallowness and fecklessness make him a dangerous man to have in the White House, with our enemies around the world on the march, and developing intercontinental missiles that can deliver nuclear bombs.
I wonder what Mr. Sowell's thinks about Trump now after almost 1.5 years in office. Has he issued a retraction? Has he said any good things about what Trump is doing?
What Sowell missed about Trump is that sometimes the intelligent minority needs to use demogogue tactics to move a sufficient amount of voters.
Nobody explained this as well as H. L. Mencken and I posted on FR his 1922 essay where Mencken lays out the argument in beautiful and humorous fashion:
H. L. Mencken Predicted Donald Trump, the Enlightened Rabble-Rouser
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