The failure at Hanoi should have shown the administration that insisting on North Korea’s total disarmament was a dead end, but instead Bolton has taken full advantage of the breakdown in talks to make sure that diplomacy with North Korea won’t produce anything at all.
John Bolton repeated the Trump administration’s absurd maximalist demands for North Korea earlier today on ABC’s This Week:
Bolton went on to say that North Korea could expect no sanctions relief until they had given up all of these things. Once again, North Korea is expected to give up everything the U. S. wants first before it can expect to see anything in return. These aren’t conditions that any government could accept, and Bolton has known this all along. These are conditions that are made to be rejected in order to provide a pretext for more punitive and aggressive measures. They are the same unreasonable demands for unilateral and complete surrender that the administration has made for the last 18 months, and with the inclusion of North Korea’s biological and chemical weapons programs they amount to Bolton’s so-called “Libya model” in all but name.
