Posted on 06/21/2018 11:53:34 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
It wasn’t what he said. But it was much more than nothing.
Donald Trump didn’t get much in the way of North Korean denuclearization in Singapore. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
In the days since the summit with Kim Jong Un, critics—including me—have pointed out how little the U.S. president got from North Korea’s leader during their much-hyped meeting. And it’s true that Trump fell far short in that meeting of his stated goal to fully dismantle North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program, and then wildly overstated his achievement by declaring the North Korean nuclear threat over. (It’s not.) But the Trump administration racked up real accomplishments in Singapore that are perhaps best understood by setting aside the president’s grand (and at times groundless) pronouncements. The summit’s modest and provisional results are actually of considerable consequence....
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
It's the closest the left can get to saying that Trump actually did something good.
The Atlantic? Not worth a look.
If you look closely at what President Trump did, it looks like he induced a charter member of the Axis of Evil and major WMD proliferation partner to turn coat and switch sides
The North Koreans are prime suppliers to terrorists and rouge states like Iran, Syria and Cuba
Gonna get interesting
It seems the author’s main complaint is that Trump didn’t completely reverse 70 years of history in one day.
It's actually well done.
Once again the left misses the President’ long game in the opening paragraph: “it’s true that Trump fell far short in that meeting of his stated goal to fully dismantle North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program,....”
The writer completely ignores, via ignorance or deliberateness, that President Trump says that is his ultimate goal and that this initial meeting is merely the first step in getting to that goal.
The instant gratification generation at its worse.
Apparently these idiots expect it to get done over night.
Because, Obama COULDA done it!
5) Trump is experimenting with a promising politics-first approach to the North Korean nuclear crisis.
In jumpstarting talks with a head-of-state summit, Trump didn’t only reverse the bottom-up process that has shaped inconclusive nuclear negotiations with North Korea over the last 25 years. He also appeared to be prioritizing the transformation of relations between the United States and North Korea over the technical details of constraining the North’s nuclear capabilities. “President Trump places great faith in his own ability to relate to others on a personal basis, and so it does seem like he wants to bolster the political relationship [with Kim] and then trust that will lead to arms control,” James Holmes of the U.S. Naval War College told me. “Politics leads, international law lags. We appear to be about to put this idea to the test.”
And while we don’t yet know the results of the test, this novel approach could potentially succeed in reducing the North Korean nuclear threat, if not eliminating it altogether. If the classic definition of a security threat is the combination of intent and capability to cause harm, U.S officials have tended to fixate on blunting North Korea’s capabilities rather than addressing intent. But intent matters too. As the German political scientist Alexander Wendt once noted, “500 British nuclear weapons are less threatening to the United States than 5 North Korean nuclear weapons, because the British are friends of the United States and the North Koreans are not.”
If there’s any chance of North Korea doing what only one country in history has done before—relinquishing nuclear weapons that it built and controls—it would probably be as a result of a massive shift in Kim Jong Un’s perception of security threats and personal and political calculations....
6) It’s possible this is the small start of something big.
Reflecting on the significance of the Singapore summit in an interview with the BBC, the former South Korean military officer I-B Chun quoted a Korean saying: “A long journey starts with the first step. And when that first step is taken, the journey is half-finished.” The journey to North Korea’s denuclearization may be a long way from half-finished, and may never finish or may even end abruptly at any moment, but Trump’s meeting with Kim is certainly a first step in the right direction. And we simply don’t know at this point where the next steps, which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his North Korean counterparts will now take, will lead.
“As risky and high-stakes as this entire process is, it makes sense because that’s the way the North operates. Their regime is top-down,” the Korea expert Duyeon Kim noted when we met in Seoul ahead of the Trump-Kim summit. She advised Trump and Kim to settle in Singapore “upon a very simple vision statement on end goals … and then have senior negotiators figure out the details, figure out timetables, figure out implementation.”
That, in fact, is exactly what the two leaders did.
No, I didn’t read the entire article, based upon the opening paragraph. If he ‘buried the lede’ of Trump’s long game, then I don’t think much of him because he begins his article with a falsehood, as I explained. Remember the rule of first impressions, he failed in making a good one.
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