2/25/19: President Trump heads for
Vietnam this afternoon, in preparation for a second summit meeting with Kim
Jong-un, the dictator of North Korea.
In an effort to get ready, he tweets twenty times in one day
and then we find out, sought advice on dealing with North Korea from…
Oh, for f**k sakes…Russia!
____________________
“He’s got a great personality. He’s a funny guy, he’s very
smart, he’s a great negotiator. He loves his people, not that I’m surprised by
that.”
President Trump
____________________
If that isn’t bad enough, it can be easy to forget Trump’s
earlier bluster; but we must remember. On January 2, 2017, the president-elect
tweeted: “North Korea just stated that it is in the final stages of developing
a nuclear weapon capable of reaching parts of the U.S. It won’t happen!”
So, he was going to keep us safe in our beds, from the moment
he took over, because it wouldn’t happen!
In April 2017, Trump offered this assessment of the murderous
North Korean dictator in an interview on CBS.
I can tell you this, and a lot
of people don’t like when I say it, but he was a young man of 26 or 27 when he
took over from his father, when his father died. He’s dealing with obviously
very tough people. A lot of people, I’m sure, tried to take that power away,
whether it was his uncle or anybody else. And he was able to do it. So
obviously, he’s a pretty smart cookie.
It helps, of course, if you want to hold power, that you can
use an anti-aircraft gun to murder your opponents.
Still, Trump is impressed. Kim is a “smart cookie.”
On June 30, 2017, Trump got it right when he responded to a
question during a White House meeting with the leader of South Korea. “The
North Korean dictatorship has no regard for the safety and security of its people
or its neighbors and has no respect for human life [emphasis added, here
and below],” he said.
The two sides proceeded to trade threats and the North fired
off a series of missiles, with increasing success. It “wouldn’t happen.” Then
it did. The North Koreans now had a missile which could strike the USA.
On August 8, during a televised meeting in the White House,
Trump threatened nuclear war.
North Korea best not make any
more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like
the world has never seen. He has been very threatening – beyond a normal
statement – and as I said, they will be met with fire, fury and, frankly, power
the likes of which the world has never seen before.
On September 19, Trump tagged Kim as “Rocket Man” during a
speech to the United Nations. The North Korean regime was a “band of
criminals.”
Right again.
If you
want to be president, it’s going to be a bitch.
Three days later he complained during a rally that “‘Rocket
Man’ should have been handled a long time ago.”
Okay: getting kind of whiny.
Someone should tell the president that diplomacy is always a
bitch. It was a bitch for George W. Bush. It was a bitch for his father and
Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and – hell, Harry Truman. If you want to be
president, it’s going to be a bitch. The Trump administration did what it
could, just like presidents and administrations have been doing the best they
can to “solve” the Israeli-Palestinian problem since 1948. Under this president
it took months for the U.S. to organize a new range of sanctions aimed at North
Korea. Naturally, we went to the United Nations and our allies for help: the
same as Obama when it came to dealing with Iran. China was pressured to curtail
trade with Kim. As with Obama and Iran, sanctions worked imperfectly.
By February 2018, the president was expressing optimism. “We have imposed the heaviest
sanctions ever imposed.”
(Redundancy is his forte.)
In May 2018, we learned that Trump and Kim would be holding a
summit meeting in Singapore. It was on. It was off. It was on again. Finally,
the two met for talks in June. Trump came away giddy with success! Speaking
with Greta Van Susteren on June 12, he changed his tune on Kim:
“He’s got a great personality,” he told her. “He’s a funny
guy, he’s very smart, he’s a great negotiator. He loves his people, not that
I’m surprised by that. I think that we have the start of an amazing deal. We’re
going to denuke North Korea.”
Van Susteren expressed doubt.
Trump continued: “I understand the past and, you know, nobody
has to tell me, he’s a rough guy. He has to be a rough guy or he has been a
rough person. He’s smart, loves his people, he loves his country. He wants a
lot of good things and that’s why he’s doing this.”
This? What was “this?”
In Trump’s mind a few hours of pleasant talk had solved the
crisis. On June 13 he felt the overpowering urge to tweet:
The North did indeed cease actual missile testing, a
provocation without doubt. They blew up one testing site, which on paper looked
good. Then satellite photography indicated they were building new launching
sites near the border with China – where we’d be reluctant to strike.
That was bad.
By September 30, 2018, however, Trump was telling everyone that Kim was sending him beautiful
letters and they had “fallen in love.” He claimed we had been on the verge of
war with North Korea before he took over – said Obama told him so – but now he
was fixing it all by himself. Kim did not surrender a single nuclear weapon,
but for Trump fans that was of no concern.
Let’s recap and consider a few differences in how the story is
being covered now. On State of the Union,
a CNN Sunday morning show, host Jake Tapper asked Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo to comment.
“Do you think North Korea
remains a nuclear threat?” Tapper asked.
“Yes,” Pompeo replied.
“But the President said he
doesn’t,” Tapper said.
“That’s not what he said...I
know precisely what he said,” Pompeo said.
“He tweeted: ‘There is no longer a nuclear
threat from North Korea,’” Tapper said.
“What he said was that the
efforts that had been made in Singapore – this commitment that Chairman Kim
made – have substantially taken down the risk to the American people. It’s the
mission of the Secretary of State and the President of the United States to
keep American people secure. We’re aiming to achieve that,” Pompeo said.
Again, all well and good. Diplomacy is always a bitch.
But on Fox News the story was presented with a different slant. On Fox, Pompeo could
insist that the current administration was no longer “cowering” before the
North Korean threat.
Okay, let’s be clear. North Korea still has all its nuclear
weapons and in 25 months, with Trump in the Oval Office, Kim Jong-un hasn’t
surrendered a single weapon, not even a BB gun.
In fact, our president now says he’s not in any rush to disarm the North. According to Fox News,
At a black-tie gathering of
governors at the White House on Sunday evening, Trump said that he and Kim had
“developed a very, very good relationship.”
“We see eye-to-eye, I believe,
but you’ll be seeing it more and more over the next couple of days,” the
president said. “I don’t want to rush anybody, I just don’t want testing. As
long as there’s no testing, we’re happy.”
So it is, on Fox, that this is billed as tremendous progress.
Trump is a genius on a world stage. If North Korea has nuclear weapons, but
doesn’t flaunt them, we should re-elect Donald in 2020, and 2024, for good
measure. When Fox reports, and you decide, they want you to decide that Obama
was “cowering” when he couldn’t get the North to give up weapons – which it got
when George W. Bush was in office. Plus, Obama was a terrible leader when he
worked to impose harsh sanctions on Iran. And Obama was terrible when China,
Russia and our key allies backed a deal which kept Iran from getting any
nuclear weapons during the eight years he was in office, and that deal is still
working today, even though Trump reneged on the U.S. part of the pact.
So, yes, on Fox, Trump is the best!
Diplomacy
is always a bitch.
Outside newsrooms where pundits practice punditry – in the
real world – diplomacy is always a bitch. If you’re a pundit, or a rival
politician, you can see what Obama does and when it doesn’t work perfectly, or
when it sometimes doesn’t work at all, you put forward your plan. You claim
your plan would have worked perfectly if only the president had listened
to you.
You can’t be proven wrong because your plan can never be put
in place and tested and so you will always sound smart.
Trump isn’t doing any worse than previous presidents in
addressing the North Korean threat. He might end up doing better if he has
time. The problem is that when it comes to diplomacy, Putin, Kim, and Prince
Mohammed bin Salman have found that they can play the president for a sap. All
they need to do is pander to his ego. That means there’s a real risk Trump
could be fooled again in Hanoi. Meanwhile, new satellite images indicate that “North Korea’s main nuclear reactor for making
weapons-grade plutonium may be operating” right now.
And that’s with Donald J. Trump headed that way.
