Because of President Donald Trump, the rogue governments of North Korea and Iran are more vulnerable than ever.
There has been a lot of misinformation about both getting out of the so-called Iran deal and getting into a new North Korean agreement. The two situations may be connected, but not in the way we are usually told.
Getting out of the Iran deal did not destroy trust in the U. S. government. Our departure from the deal does not mean that North Korea cannot reliably negotiate with America.
In 2015, the Iran deal was not approved as either a Senate-ratified treaty or a joint congressional resolution. Had the deal been a treaty, President Donald Trump could not have walked away from it so easily and with so little downside.
Then-President Barack Obama knew that he did not have majority congressional support for his initiative. Therefore, he desperately sought ways to circumvent the constitutionally directed authority of the Senate and redefine a treaty as a mere executive order.
Obama got the deal approved by the Iranians in part by paying them ransom for hostages through huge nighttime cash transfers.
A cynical North Korea knew only too well that in the past, Obama either entered into agreements or avoided them based on his therapeutic notion that human nature was both changeable and essentially noble.
The North Koreans now seem worried that a more unpredictable Trump has a quite different, pessimistic and tragic view that humans are predictably capable of almost anything — if not strongly deterred.
After Trump’s rejection of the Iran deal, North Korea now concedes that it cannot cajole a flawed agreement with the current U. S. president, who is mercurial rather than scripted in his reactions.
North Korea is the stealthy and illegal supplier of ballistic missile and nuclear weapons technology to Iran. Should North Korea enter into a detente with the West, Iran might lose a rogue nuclear patron — one of the keys to its efforts to get a bomb.
