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North Korea: Has Trump Rejected Diplomacy and Does It Matter?

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Critical Perspectives on U. S. Foreign Policy
Korea watchers were offered a glimmer of hope in a front page, above-the-fold story in last Sunday’s New York Times. According to David Sanger’s reporting from Beijing, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was in “direct communications” with the North Korean government of Kim Jong Un through at least three channels to seek “a possible way forward” from the escalating threats of war on the Korean Peninsula. Suddenly, it seemed, the diplomacy long promised by Tillerson was back on the front burner.
But within hours, President Trump threw cold water on the idea. In a series of early morning tweets, he informed the American people that he “our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man,” his derisive term for the 33-year-old Kim. He then added: “Save your energy Rex, we’ll do what has to be done!”
Asked on Monday about Trump’s apparent slap in the face to his own top diplomat, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders backed the president. “We’ve been clear that now is not the time to talk,” she said . “The only conversations that have taken place were that… would be on bringing back Americans who have been detained. Beyond that, there will be no conversations with North Korea at this time.”
Immediately, analysts speculated that perhaps Tillerson and Trump were playing some kind of bizarre good-cop-bad-cop routine. If so, two AP diplomatic reporters wrote, that such a dangerous game “may be increasing the risk of miscalculation by the isolated, communist government, which lacks insight into the Trump administration’s thinking and could mistake brinkmanship for an overt threat of war.”
It’s still unclear how this one-two punch from Tillerson and Trump will work out. Until then, here are some thoughts on Trump’s latest disaster into the foreign policy minefield of North Korea and its decades-long standoff with the United States.
War of Words
Trump’s rejection of diplomacy and his taunts of “Little Rocket Man” show that he has taken Kim’s missile and nuclear tests personally—the last thing a US official should do when dealing with this angry but wily regime. Moreover, his threats to rain “fire and fury” on and to “totally destroy” North Korea if it doesn’t follow US dictates have exposed his own hatred of this country of 25 million people.
Expressing these thoughts so openly has even disturbed neoconservative regime change proponents, such as Bruce Klingner, the former CIA analyst who heads up Korea programs for the right-wing Heritage Foundation. “Trump’s personal invectives have become a distraction from the real issue of North Korea’s growing military threat and violations of UN resolutions,” Klingner wrote in an op-ed in The Hill published on Monday .

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