If anything had come of Trump’s inane love-fest with Kim Jong-Un perhaps it would have been worth the international embarrassment of his ridiculous behavior. Unfortunately, all the greatest dealmaker in the world did was give away American leverage to make a laughingstock of himself and give Kim Jong Un the space to grow his nuclear arsenal.
On the other hand, he didn’t start a nuclear war so there’s that.
Anyway, here is the inevitable outcome:
North Korea officially declared an end Friday to its diplomatic dalliance with the U.S. But experts say it’s been clear for some time that President Donald Trump’s bold but risky effort to sweet talk Kim Jong Un into relinquishing his nuclear weapons never really went anywhere.
Two high-profile meetings with North Korea’s leader bought Trump a hiatus from bellicose rhetoric and nuclear tests, but Kim never stopped building nuclear warheads and the missiles to deliver them, U.S. intelligence officials and private analysts say.
Now, on the second anniversary of that first Trump-Kim summit in Singapore, North Korea is renouncing the diplomacy while promising to expand its weapons program, even as experts say it is ever closer to perfecting a long-range missile capable of reaching and destroying an American city.
Trump therefore joins a long list of presidents who tried and failed to cut a deal to get rid of North Korean nuclear weapons — but the first one who met face to face with the leader of the outlaw regime, lending it a measure of legitimacy. Trump at one point mused that he and Kim “fell in love,” and he showered praise on a dictator who is said by human rights groups to keep tens of thousands of political prisoners in vast gulags.
Trump made a series of other concessions, including the unilateral cancellation of joint U.S. and South Korean missile exercises. He got very little in return.
“In terms of the so-called goals of the summit, we made no progress in any of those things,” said Victor Cha, a former White House adviser to President George W. Bush and now senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and an NBC News contributor. “And this was arguably the one piece of diplomacy into which Trump put all of his personal capital.”
Now:
Kim resurfaced last month, and on Friday, his government made clear that any agreement with Trump was now null and void.
“Even a slim ray of optimism for peace and prosperity on the Korean Peninsula has faded away into a dark nightmare,” the country’s foreign minister, Ri Son-Gwon, said in a statement marking the second anniversary of the Singapore summit.
He called the talks “nothing but a foolish trick hatched to keep [North Korea] bound to dialogue and use it in favor of the political situation and election in the U.S.,” adding, “Never again will we provide the U.S. chief executive with another package to be used for achievements without receiving any returns. Nothing is more hypocritical than an empty promise.”
According to the experts they believed that the deal was to give Trump some good news in exchange for sanctions relief. They didn’t get the sanctions lifted in spite of Trump’s obvious desire to do it. But they got a lot:
The president stopped talking about North Korean human rights abuses. When House Republicans recommended sanctioning 12 Chinese banks allegedly involved in sanctions busting and money laundering for North Korea, Trump sanctioned none of them.
And the Trump administration cancelled joint military exercises on the Korean peninsula even as North Korean military exercises continued apace. Meanwhile, Trump pressed South Korea to pay more to support the U.S. troop presence on its soil.
“It didn’t improve relations with South Korea and it didn’t lead to any reciprocal actions by North Korea,” Klingner said.
China, Russia and South Korea also “took their foot off the pedal,” in terms of enforcing sanctions to pressure the regime, Cha said.
North Korea did send home the remains of 55 U.S. service members, but 619 sets of remains have been sent back in previous administrations, Klingner said.
The North freed five detainees, compared to 11 during the Obama administration. One of them was Otto Warmbier, who returned in a vegetative state and soon died.
Even the suspension of nuclear and long-range missile testing is less than meets the eye, Klingner said. “We’ve had several instances of three or more years of no testing under Bush and Obama,” he said.
It’s not that Trump wasn’t warned. Even as he was declaring victory, intelligence officials were telling NBC News that North Korea had not halted work on its nuclear program.
Even in public, intelligence chiefs acknowledged that North Korea was extremely unlikely to give up its weapons because it considers them necessary for regime survival.
That glaring contradiction was among the reasons Congress was unable to hold a public Worldwide Threats hearing, an annual briefing, this year. Intelligence officials didn’t want to have to once again dispute the president in public.
Trump truly believes that anyone who flatters him is his friend and anyone who doesn’t is his enemy. He is a child and Kim Jong Un gave him the lollipops he wanted.
But the flattery was actually almost all going in the other direction. Trump gave Kim the legitimacy he craved and went to incredible lengths to lick his boots, absolving him of the grotesque carnage of the Kim regime, even defending him against accusations that he knew about the torture of Americans. Even more sickening was the GOP’s acquiescence to Trump’s ridiculous overtures after having insulted previous presidents as weaklings and Commie symps for having negotiated treaties that actually held the Kim regime back.
Again, any result that doesn’t wind up with nuclear war is better than the alternative. But Trump played all the cards and failed miserably. He gave away the leverage that could have been useful for a sane president going forward and ended up with a much more heavily nuclear-armed North Korea than he started with. It’s very hard to predict what will come next.