If anyone has attempted a „great deception“ over the last six months, it is the administration officials that have pretended that North Korea agreed to disarm at Singapore.<\/b>
\nThe framing in this New York Times article on North Korean missile production is a bit, shall we say, deceptive:
It is wrong to say that North Korea is being deceptive by continuing to develop the missile program that it has been developing for years. There is no agreement that prohibits them from doing what they are doing, and so they can\u2019t be deceiving anyone by carrying on with their missile development. It is to be expected that North Korea would continue to develop and build missiles when their government has never said that it would not do so.
If anyone has attempted a \u201cgreat deception\u201d over the last six months, it is the administration officials that have pretended that North Korea agreed to disarm at Singapore. If the existence of these sites \u201ccontradicts Mr. Trump\u2019s assertion that his landmark diplomacy is leading to the elimination of a nuclear and missile program,\u201d the fault lies entirely with Trump. He is the one making false claims of progress in pursuing the administration\u2019s unrealistic goals, and it is hardly the first time that reality has not lined up with the president\u2019s statements. When faced with the evidence of these sites, the administration continues to promote the fiction that North Korea has agreed to disarm:
The administration has been overselling the results of its talks with North Korea, and they have been putting words in Kim\u2019s mouth for months. Only the president\u2019s cheerleaders have been gullible enough to take these claims seriously. North Korea has certainly never agreed to the elimination of all of its ballistic missile programs, and when our government tells us that North Korea has done this they are simply making it up and hoping no one will notice.
Presenting North Korean behavior as a \u201cdeception\u201d implies that they have made commitments that they are secretly violating, but there have been so definite, specific commitments made as part of any agreement with the U. S. or South Korea. Even if North Korea is prepared to agree to some limits on or reductions of its arsenal, it makes sense that they would keep building up that arsenal to give them more bargaining chips. However, as long as the administration remains wedded to the fantasy that North Korea has already agreed to give up its nuclear weapons and missiles, there won\u2019t be any progress on more modest, achievable goals.<\/p>\n