On Monday evening, President Trump met with North Korean dictator Kim Jung Un, the tyrannical overlord of a slave state with 25 million prisoners and a gulag system containing hundreds of thousands of human beings, a radical threat to world peace who has tested nuclear weapons and long-range miss
On Monday evening, President Trump met with North Korean dictator Kim Jung Un, the tyrannical overlord of a slave state with 25 million prisoners and a gulag system containing hundreds of thousands of human beings, a radical threat to world peace who has tested nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. Trump gave Kim the thumbs up; the American flag, the symbol of freedom in the world, was placed alongside the flag of North Korea, the closest thing to the Nazi swastika in the world today. Then President Trump praised Kim fulsomely, using verbiage to describe him that he would never use about our G-7 allies.
And the right celebrated.
There’s nothing to celebrate yet. Nothing. Here’s why.
1. Trump Got No Serious Concessions From Kim. According to Trump, Kim said he’ll denuclearize. Sure he will. Just as the Kim family has promised verbally to denuclearize for decades. The actual signed agreement between the United States and North Korea is pathetically weak. As Heritage Foundation research fellow for Northeast Asia Bruce Klingner states:
Here’s what the document itself says:
There’s nothing new here.
The only thing that seemingly changes here is the explicit commitment by the North Korean government to recovering remains from the POW/MIAs of the Korean War. But Korean officials have been promising that same thing for years, and indeed, between 1996 and 2005, US-NK search teams “conducted 33 joint recovery operations and recovered 229 sets of American remains.” That program was discontinued because North Korea insisted we pay them for the privilege, a program some Americans referred to as “bones for bucks.” But we recontinued it in 2011, then stopped again in 2016.
So, what justifies all of this? Here’s Trump’s description of what he got in negotiations:
But that’s precisely what the North Koreans have been promising for the entirety of negotiations stretching back decades. They’ve always been lying.
2. Trump Legitimized Kim. Trump legitimized Kim. There are no two ways about it. Here’s the triumphal video Trump released this morning:
That video is inappropriate for any meeting with a dictator, let alone a dictator who uses WMD to kill a family member in an airport. If this video had been produced by Kim for propaganda use by his own people, that would have been just as believable.
But that was just the beginning. Trump said it was his “great honor” to meet Kim. He called Kim “very talented” and added that “you can take 1 out of 10,000” and they wouldn’t be able to do what Kim has done. He said Kim was “very smart” and a “very good negotiator.” He said that it’s a “rough situation” in North Korea but it’s also “rough in a lot of places.” He credited Kim with making the Olympics a “tremendous success by agreeing to participate.” Finally, he said, “His country does love him. His people, you see the fervor.” That’s pathetic. If Obama had said it, conservatives would rightly have gone ballistic. (And by the way, if Obama had said it, the media currently crushing Trump would have praised him to the skies.)
3. Trump Delegitimized America’s Actions In The Korean Region. Trump said that he would stop a planned military exercise with the South Koreans, and that he wanted to pull American troops off the Korean peninsula:
The exercises have reportedly been postponed; there’s no reality to the movement of American troops off the peninsula, thank goodness.
Trump even parroted Kim blaming the United States for past North Korean failures to abide by their word:
Furthermore, Trump signaled that America’s military options are off the table – he explained that in a war, “I think you could have lost 20 million people or 30 million people. This is really an honor for me to do this. I think potentially you could have lost 30 million or 40 million people.” So much for the threat of force bringing Kim to the table.
Now, perhaps all of this is worth it. Perhaps something real does materialize from this meeting. If so, it will have been a masterstroke – a move of genius. If not, it’s a debacle. There’s no in-between here. President Trump treated Kim Jung Un with respect unbefitting one of the worst human beings on planet earth, particularly from the leader of the free world. He better get something extraordinary in exchange.
