Final Thoughts on the North Korea Summit
Published at 07:09 on 16 June 2018
It is yet more evidence that Trump is Putin’s puppet. In case you haven’t heard, Putin is the one who advised (or would it be simply told) Trump to stop holding war games with South Korea. I wish I were making this up. The cumulative level of evidence that the president is a treasonous asset of an unfriendly foreign power is like something out of a bad Hollywood movie.
That said, the war games concession is mostly a nothingburger. Trump made it verbally, and as they say, verbal agreements are not even worth the paper they are written on. It can be most easily reneged on later. Bill Clinton made a very similar concession in 1994, and it was later withdrawn.
In the short term, it probably makes the world safer. It’s far better to not have two crazy, nuclear-armed leaders threatening each other with annihilation.
In the longer term, it probably makes the world less safe. Sooner or later, one or both sides is likely to renege. North Korea has made promises identical to the ones it just made many times before, and it’s reneged in the past. There’s nothing whatsoever to indicate this time will be any different; the essential nature of the regime there remains unchanged. Plus, as I already alluded to above, the USA might renege on the verbal commitment to stop holding military exercises. When the reneging starts, expect relations to quickly swirl down the toilet again. Trump in particular will feel slighted and is likely to let his temper get the best of him. This is particularly the case given how Trump has evidently convinced himself that the job of disarming North Korea is mostly a done deal.
Many South Koreans seem quite naïvely optimistic right now. Not having any first-hand knowledge, I don’t know exactly why this is the case. My best guess is that they are tired of all the tensions, just want them to end, and are choosing to reassure themselves by believing in an optimistic future scenario, unrealistic though it may be.