Your statement starts off with a strawman, Sam. Trump didn't say he did it to save money. He said he did it because it was demeaning and threatening to Kim. Then Trump said 'and it also saves money'.
While I did say he did it to save money ("an incredible amount of money", I think he said), I also said this:
"Trump took Kim's line when he characterized the exercises as "provocative". The Pentagon and S. Korea say that they are "defensive". Incredibly, Trump spoke better of Kim than he and his advisers spoke of Trudeau."
They are still in a formal state of war, Kate. If they wanted to do something real, they could have formally ended it.
From your comments about the Olympics, apparently you are another liberal who's going to try and spin things to put forth the idea that Moon is responsible for the breakthrough. But that's a distortion of the timeline. Trump's threats and Trump's strongarming China into supporting the sanctions are what brought Kim around. Everything that followed flows from that.
I realize that that is your line. But it ignores a critical fact. Kim has offered to meet with every president since Clinton. While Clinton refused to meet him personally, he did sanction lower level talks and even came to an agreement, something that for some reason Trump and Trump backers ignore. Here is a history of it: washingtonpost.com
If you read the history, you will see that Clinton got much further than Trump, but it broke down during the Bush admin, and Kim restarted the program, with his first test in 2006.
I realize that you like to give Trump credit for everything you consider good in the world, but it is far more complicated than you suggest. Here is a reasonable timeline of events:
washingtonpost.com
You will continue to believe that it was Trump's tough talking that led Kim to the table, but personally, I don't think Kim was terribly intimidated. The fact that Kim got far more out of this meeting strongly suggests to me that it was Trump who wanted the meeting more than Kim. And the timeline indicates that Kim has been talking to China a fair bit over the past few months. It is no accident that Putin was in Beijing last week. My opinion is that Trump is getting rolled. I realize that you disagree with this, we will have to agree to disagree.
As for my "faulty premise": "The premise is that Kim is going to do everything he can to wiggle out of his commitment to complete denuclearization." You still don't know what Kim means by "complete denuclearization". Neither do I. And the vague paper that they signed is basically meaningless.
What you guys seem to envision is some kind of protracted adversarial struggle, with each player seeking advantage over the other while a 'game, set and match' is hammered out.
Yes, I do. And that is how I believe Trump sees every negotiation. Especially foreign policy. Look how he treated countries that have been our historic allies. Badly. Cherry picking some tariffs and saying that they must be changed. It is absurd. "We've been treated unfairly," he says over and over again. TPP was a step in the direction of more free trade with our Asian allies and Trump just dropped it. It shows that both the way he sees negotiation and his lack of understanding of how tariffs and subsidies are intertwined with whole economies and how they can be changed. Slowly, patiently, over time and long negotiations.
But what if Kim is basically on the same page as Trump? What if Kim actually does want to leave the past behind as he said at the end of the conference?
Maybe he does. Maybe this man who has in the last year murdered his half brother and an uncle and who knows how many other people, who has been starving his people for decades, who maintains gulags filled with political prisoners, whose government is based on a personality cult, maybe we just completely misunderstand him and all he really wants is to become a rich liberal democracy like his brethren in the south. Anything is possible. But some things aren't very probable. And the way both Kim and Trump went about this makes long term success seem very unlikely. |
