It was bound to happen.
Two immovable objects can quit working to try to move each other, but sooner or later one will again try to move the other.
No entreaties from U.S. leaders are going to change the internally directed course of the dictators in North Korea.
Kim bought some new negotiations with the U.S. with his past provocations and belligerence; he got face-to-face with a U.S. President which none of his predecessors had ever achieved.
The U.S. acted, and still acts, as if they gave Kim nothing, which is a misunderstanding of North Korea internally, and just how important to the regime is it’s own people’s perception of its leader on the world stage. That is not just powerful among the populace, but in keeping control of the levers of government among the elite.
It is right and good that Bolton is helping Trump to not give away anything that the U.S. considers important, regardless of the matter that to Kim he already, at least for a time, got something powerfully important to him.
But the author is essentially right. Whereas Kim thought his provocations had brought Trump to meet with him to make some concessions, none have been made. And whereas Trump thought that Kim was finally a leader willing to make compromises for peace, he wasn’t, and he won’t.
An elephant in the room is sitting in plain site, never admitted, never discussed, never questioned in spite of how it colors all that North Korea does.
Not just the Constitution of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK - North Korea), but that of the Republic of Korea (ROK - South Korea) as well, define their territorial writ as the entire Korean peninsula.
In the ROK Constitution:
Article 3
The territory of the Republic of Korea shall consist of the Korean peninsula and its adjacent
islands. (found at: http://www.moleg.go.kr/english/korLawEng?pstSeq=54794)
In the DPRK Constitution:
Article 1
“The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is an independent socialist state representing the interests of all the Korean people.” (as found at: https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Peoples_Republic_of_Korea_1998.pdf)
As far as the dictators of North Korea are concerned, the U.S. has been at war with KOREA (all of it) and the leaders of North Korea are the leaders of all Korea. For that reason it is only the U.S. that matters in negotiations with North Korea, as far as the state and status of military and security affairs. The rest is an internal affair and not central to the North Korea-U.S. relationship, as far as North Korea is concerned. Politically, as far as North Korea is concerned the governments of South Korea, all of them, have been and remain puppets of the U.S., and will be washed away once North Korea and the U.S. can make peace.
The North Korean position, as demanded by its perception of its own legitimacy, as enshrined in its constitution, can never be reconciled to the compromises that would be necessarily demanded by the U.S., and any such comprises made by the U.S. (in error in my view) would consequently compromise its commitments to South Korea.
Unless some great internal compromise occurs within the power elite of North Korea, or that elite implodes and creates a power vacuum in North Korea, the U.S. and North Korea will remain unmovable objects that cannot, by the demands of their respective interests, give each other what they want.
This is SPOT ON!! Wow. WULI. You get it! And more and more are getting it too, and waking up to DPRK’s crap and lies and insincerity and that this is going really nowhere—that they are nuking up if anything through fissile materials and have only just suspended the bold provocations for a season to get what they want. They’ve done that under Clinton, Bush and Obama before as a tactic only—then returned to their misbehavior. They’ll do it again under Trump. And I should add here THANK GOD for BOLTON and POMPEO who reigned in some silliness from the President and the two are are now roundly hated by Pyongyang so you gotta know they did something right. They’ve done a great service to the country IMHO
But on FR there were some real surreal days around here when KJU was almost a Protected Class Minority here, you would incredulously think. Still a little bit of it but folks I believe have taken the blinders by now.