Nuclear war or a beautiful vase? Merry Christmas.
Donald Trump jokes Kim Jong-un might send him ‘beautiful vase’ instead of conducting ballistic missile test after aggressive North Korean dictator promises ‘Christmas gift’ pic.twitter.com/vj6MmnUU7L— @WADIBIG (@wadibig) December 24, 2019
Notice that he whines about everyone “surprising him these days.” Poor baby. Nobody knows the trouble he’s seen.
If you want to read about where we are at the moment with North Korea and how we got here, this article in the Atlantic
is the best I’ve read recently about it:
The story of how Trump’s North Korea policy collapsed is in part one of Pyongyang’s intransigence, obfuscation, and bad faith in talks about its nuclear program, as well as one in which U.S. and North Korean officials misread one another and at times placed too much stock in the rosy messages of the South Korean government, a key intermediary.
But it’s also a tale about the American president undercutting his own success. Trump prioritized the North Korean threat, amassed unmatched leverage against Pyongyang, and boldly shook up America’s approach to its decades-old adversary. Yet he squandered many of these gains during his first summit with Kim, in Singapore, and set several precedents there that have hobbled nuclear talks ever since. He shifted the paradigm with North Korea in style but not in substance. While transforming the role of the president in negotiations with North Korea, he did not bring the same inventiveness to the negotiations themselves.
[…]Over the course of one momentous day in Singapore, Trump shook Kim’s hand, played him a faux movie trailer about the economic bounty awaiting a nuclear-free North Korea, and joined the North Korean leader in committing in writing to strive for peace and denuclearization. Unlike traditional leader-to-leader summits, Singapore was “meet and agree first and then fill out the details later,” Brooks said, adding that he felt this was a wise method, “given the personalities involved and their approach to central leadership, top-down decision making.”
But this also established a problematic pattern for future meetings between Trump and Kim: Set a date and venue, and then have negotiators scramble to figure out the details of what’s actually achievable without necessarily empowering those lower-level officials. The top-down approach short-circuited bottom-up talks rather than turbocharging them.
That wasn’t the only troublesome precedent that the Singapore summit set. Trump also began framing the diplomatic effort to denuclearize North Korea in far more personal, triumphalist terms, as something he alone could accomplish because of his dealmaking savvy and chemistry with Kim. Instead of an unusual means, his reality-TV diplomacy became an end in itself. This only solidified the North Korean view that it was best to deal directly with the president rather than with his more detail-oriented and less flexible subordinates. Kim echoed this narrative in letters he exchanged with Trump.
[…]
For the North Koreans, Yun said, the “lesson is essentially—this is not just in Singapore, but throughout—that only by dealing with Trump are they going to get what they want.”
This comes as no big surprise, of course. Anyone could have seen that Kim had Trump’s number.
Anyway, it’s fallen apart now. Let’s just hope Kim sends a very lovely vase.
If you have your credit card out and you feel like putting a little something in the stocking, I’d be most grateful.
This is an exhausting time and I know everyone is sick of it. But we’ve got a hell of year ahead of us and I could use your help to keep this old blog afloat.
And thanks again for reading and contributing all thee years. I am more grateful than you know. — digby
Happy Hollandaise everyone!
If you have your credit card out and you feel like putting a little something in the stocking, I’d be most grateful.
This is an exhausting time and I know everyone is sick of it. But we’ve got a hell of year ahead of us and I could use your help to keep this old blog afloat.
And thanks again for reading and contributing all thee years. I am more grateful than you know. — d
Happy Hollandaise everyone!