Considering National Review is now the Anti-Trump / Never-Trump standard - whatever they opine should be summarily dismissed as nonsense. NR is no longer worth any serious consideration.
Not scorpion to our frog.... North Korea’s scorpion to our Meerkat
Kim tried to play Trump like previous Kims played previous Presidents. But you don’t play Trump. So I think the summit, in whatever form it ultimately takes, will proceed eventually with a much more subdued and chastened Kim. And it should, a peaceful, non-nuclear North Korea is in everybody’s interest.
Flashback to the 2016 campaign and a FR post:
National Review: Trump Worse Than Hillary
Lowry the publisher destroyed a conservative publication and W. H. Buckely has rolled over in his grave many times over.
Kim has been warned by his advisers and by the US and China that, due to cell phones and other forms of contact with the outside world, his people realize that their country is a malignant aberration of poverty and misery. With corruption out of control, Kim's regime is decomposing and will not survive long if he does not produce prosperity and a better life for his people.
Moreover, China's interest is now tilted against Kim in that a faltering and nuclear-armed North Korea on your border is like having a wild porcupine sleeping in your lap. Trump's withdrawal from the summit is a way of forcing China to tell Kim to shape up and to make a deal with Trump.
At a summit, Trump (and Pompeo) can speak with unique authority as to deal terms. In return for denuclearization, they can promise North Korea international help in improving the health and welfare of his people, with development deals that would unlock the immense wealth of its mineral deposits and produce wide-scale prosperity. If not, after another turn of the screws in the form of economic sanctions, Kim will have a bad end when his people turn on him or the Chinese depose him via a coup.
Too - funny - like saying Ali should stop punching when he has his opponent on the ropes...
Dear National Review:
We hired a president to determine foreign policy.
Thanks for your “consideration.”
5.56mm
Translation: ‘The North Korean summit should stay canceled because we don’t want any successes for Trump’.
NR can’t stand the thought of a major Trump success any more than Nancy P. or Chrissy Mathews can.
North Koreans paid off the National Review....
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.
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.
Odd, it seemed to me like it was the press that was making
a big deal of the North’s nukes.
The President certainly wasn’t going on about it.