In my opinion, the most talked about Trump-Kim summit will end in anti-climax. I "predict" or "guess intelligently" that Trump, like the tribal chief who failed to break the koramon's egg in my political satire, will not get his so-called "real deal", i.e. complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization of North Korea, at his summit with Kim. P.S. This thread was posted 4 minutes before the Trump-Kim summit. http://www.politicalforum.com/index...satire-the-old-man-of-the-mountain-9a.528293/
2. At last, barely two months after the Trump-Kim summit, my "prediction" or "intelligent guess" has proved to be correct. On 24 August 2018, Donald Trump conceded to domestic and international concerns that his prior claims of world-altering progress on the Korean peninsula had been strikingly premature. As usual, when things fall apart, Trump the "blame king" looks for a scapegoat. On Thursday (23 August 2018 ) Secretary of State Mike Pompeo appointed Stephen Biegun, a senior executive with the Ford Motor Co., to be his special envoy for North Korea and said he and Biegun would visit that country next week. The State Department never confirmed details of the trip, but it had been expected that Pompeo would be in Pyongyang for at least several hours Monday, according to several diplomatic sources familiar with the plan. Suddenly next day, 24 August 2018, Trump directed Pompeo to delay the planned trip to North Korea, citing insufficient progress on denuclearization. White House officials declined to specify what prompted Trump to call off Pompeo's trip or what had changed since the president's rose-coloured-glasses assessments of the nuclear situation just days ago. A senior White House official said Trump made the decision to cancel the visit Friday morning during a meeting with Pompeo, Biegun, chief of staff John Kelly and National Security Adviser John Bolton, who joined by phone. Intelligence and defence officials were not in the meeting, the official said, seeming to indicate that the breakdown was diplomatic in nature. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations. In my opinion, Trump cancelled Pompeo's visit to North Korea probably after he failed to get any assurance from Kim that he would opt to meet with Pompeo instead of visiting a potato farm again. The cancellation of the visit should be good news for Pompeo whose catchword is “joke”. Now that he has some respite from playing reluctantly in Trump’s “greatest joke of century”, he should be grinning more cheerfully than usual. Failing to get Kim's assurance to meet with the "capital P" (for Pompeo) instead of "small p" (for potatoes), Trump finally woke up from his make-believe world of denuclearizing North Korea. After his June summit with Kim in Singapore, Trump declared on Twitter: "There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea." "Before taking office people were assuming that we were going to War with North Korea. President Obama said that North Korea was our biggest and most dangerous problem," he added. "No longer - sleep well tonight!" Trump had kept up the positive tone on the denuclearization of North Korea as recently as Tuesday (21 August 2018 ) at a campaign rally in West Virginia. There Trump maintained "we're doing well with North Korea." "There's been no missile launches. There's been no rocket launches," he added. To prop up his image of invincibility and infallibility, and his ability to achieve victory after victory for his supporters, Trump the "blame king" credits himself for his success but blames others for his failure. This time the scapegoat is not failed president Obama or crooked Hillary, but the Chinese leader. He laid unspecified blame on China, saying he does not believe it is helping "because of our much tougher Trading stance." He tweeted that "Pompeo looks forward to going to North Korea in the near future, most likely after our Trading relationship with China is resolved." He added: "In the meantime I would like to send my warmest regards and respect to Chairman Kim. I look forward to seeing him soon!" The outcome of his meeting with Kim, however, is a glaring example of his failure and a solid proof that he is living in a make-believe world. Instead of saying "No longer - sleep well tonight!" after the summit, he should say “No longer sleep well tonight!" http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/08/25/pompeo-asked-by-trump-to-delay-visit-to-north-korea.html
3. Mythili Sampathkumar is a journalist, copywriter, consultant, general traveller and amateur photographer. She reports on a variety of topics but her focus has been on US foreign policy, United Nations, climate change, international development, education and US politics from New York City, but sometimes further afield like Poland, Peru, France, India, Germany, Morocco, etc. The following are excerpts from Mythili Sampathkumar's 12 June 2018 article headlined "Trump-Kim summit was ‘purely a reality show’, senator says" with the subheading "Criticism of the president came from both sides of the aisle". (Begin excerpts) Senator Chuck Schumer called the recent Singapore meeting between US President Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un “purely a reality show summit”. Other Congressional Democrats and Republicans are not exactly celebrating what the White House labelled a “historic” step towards peace in the Korean peninsula... Mr Schumer pointed out that the definition of denuclearisation has not yet been set between the parties, adding that Mr Trump “has granted a brutal and repressive dictatorship the international legitimacy it has long craved”. Senator Mark Warner, head of the Senate intelligence committee continuing to investigate Mr Trump’s 2016 campaign team for alleged collusion with Russian officials, was none too happy with the summit delivering Mr Kim “exactly what he wanted”. He said the leader, accused of keeping up to 130,000 prisoners in labour camps and a slew of human rights violations as told by defectors, “walked away from Singapore with...the pomp, circumstance and prestige of a meeting with the President of the United States – while making no specific commitments in return”. Fellow Democratic Senator Chris Coons added that the “TV handshake” summit was a “dream” come true for the young, isolated leader. He received “legitimacy on the world stage, an invitation to the White House, no concessions on human rights, and no clear concessions on a timeline or a process for” getting rid of his nuclear weapons programme, Mr Coons noted. But, criticism was not limited to the opposition, which has been the case of late on many of Mr Trump’s foreign policy moves. Even fairly reliable Trump ally Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell did not echo the White House’s optimistic and positive language. He said that though the summit was a “major first step” it does not mean much if Pyongyang does not follow through with total denuclearisation.... House Speaker Paul Ryan, another relatively staunch ally of the administration, echoed his Senate counterpart when he said that “only time will tell if North Korea is serious this time”. Democrats were critical of Mr Trump’s perceived concession of halting joint US-South Korea military exercises in the region without a similar public concession from Mr Kim.... Congress members were also critical of the fact that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s language regarding the “complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula” was not included in the joint statement signed by the president and Mr Kim. Mr Trump’s “security guarantees” was also vague and unmatched by North Korea. Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair and Republican Senator Bob Corker said in a statement he is “glad” the leaders were able to meet but that “it is difficult to determine what of concrete nature has occurred”.... Marco Rubio, Republican Senator and a sometimes-critic of Mr Trump since being personally attacked while running for president against him in 2016, tweeted that he realised Mr Trump would have to “butter him up to get a good deal” from Mr Kim, the regime leader is “not a talented guy”. “He inherited the family business from his dad & grandfather. He is a total weirdo who would not be elected assistant dog catcher in any democracy,” he tweeted, echoing an insult Mr Trump has used and making some wonder whether he was referring to the president or Mr Kim given both the leaders’ backgrounds. (End excerpts) Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/trump...h-korea-singapore-chuck-schumer-a8396106.html
4. David Frum is a senior editor at The Atlantic. In 2001–02, he was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush. The following is full text of his May 17, 2018 article headlined "Trump Can't Afford to Admit His Failures With North Korea" with the subheading "The administration has no choice now but to carry on the pretense that the negotiations are proceeding favorably". (Begin text) Think of the past few months of President Trump’s Korea policy as a drama, unfolding in multiple acts. Act I: Trump impulsively agrees to meet North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Perhaps unaware that the North Koreans have sought such a summit meeting for decades, Trump boasts that he has extracted a major concession. Act II: Trump gradually comes to appreciate that he has been duped. To prove that he’s a winner, not a fool, he begins to oversell the summit, promising that the denuclearization of North Korea is at hand. Act III: The North Koreans issue a public statement refuting Trump’s boasts. No, they will not denuclearize. And oh, by the way, it’s Trump who must pay tribute to them, not the other way around: If he wants his summit, he should cancel joint U.S.–South Korean exercises. We’re in Act IV right now—and Act V has yet to be written. As of midday on May 16, the Trump administration was reacting to the embarrassment of Act III by denying that anything untoward has happened. Throughout his career, Trump has coped with failure by brazenly misrepresenting failure as success. In 1995, for example, Trump presided over the sale of the Plaza Hotel for $75 million less than he had paid for it in 1988. His ownership stake had long since been extinguished, and by then he was little more than a front for the syndicate of creditors who actually controlled what remained of Trump’s portfolio after 1990, when he faced bankruptcy in all but name. Yet Trump insisted of the Plaza purchaser, “I put him through the wringer and made a great deal.” We should probably expect the Plaza Hotel treatment for the coming Kim-Trump summit. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has demanded “complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization,” or CVID in the argot of the negotiators. That will not be forthcoming. But perhaps something else will: a testing pause, maybe, or some other interim measure that can somehow be upgraded into the promised “great deal.” The administration may have little choice by now but to carry on the pretense that it is scoring a great success in its Korea negotiations, and for two reasons. First, U.S. options in the Korean peninsula depend heavily on the cooperation of South Korea. Trump has now thoroughly frightened and alienated South Korean opinion. South Korea’s dovish president, Moon Jae In, was elected with only 41 percent of the vote. Polls now show his approval rating in the mid-70s, because of his success in drawing Trump away from “fire and fury” and toward negotiations. As Robert Kelly of Pusan National University in South Korea observes, revulsion against Trump has consolidated a dovish consensus in South Korea. Much of the work of snookering Trump into the Kim summit has actually been done by South Koreans, not North Koreans. It was President Moon who slyly insinuated that Trump deserved a Nobel Prize for the summit—bait that Trump swallowed like a credulous guppy. In fact, it was a South Korean delegation that first put the summit idea into Trump’s head back in March. It was the South Koreans who immediately announced Trump’s impulsive “yes” answer at the very entrance to the West Wing, thus effectively locking the door behind the president before he understood the full implications of what he had done—and before he could be dissuaded by his staff and secretary of state. The South Korean leadership is not only seeking to constrain Trump’s options—it is advertising that constraint to the world. In August 2017, Moon asserted a veto over any U.S. military operations on the peninsula. Maybe Moon can enforce that veto. Maybe not. But U.S. strategic planners have been put on notice that America’s most important ally in this theater wants no part of a Trump-led war. Under the circumstances, pretending to believe in the success of a Trump-Kim summit may become the least-bad option inside the Pentagon as well as in Seoul. But the Trump administration may have little choice except to oversell the summit for another reason, this time of its own making: Before actually booking a Korean success, it committed itself to a second confrontation, against Iran. Two nuclear crises in one summer is strong coffee, even for a John Bolton National Security Council. If the administration is to prosecute a vigorous policy versus Iran, it needs to de-escalate in northeast Asia. A pretend-success at the summit is—at this point—probably the only way to achieve that de-escalation. Maybe even more important, the very unfavorable situation that administration has created for itself with regard to Iran—reverting to the pre-2015 sanctions policy, only this time without allies and without UN resolutions—strongly biases the Trump White House to delude itself about success in Korea. If the sharp international sanctions against North Korea failed to bend Kim to Trump’s will, then the outlook seems dire for the weaker unilateral sanctions Trump can impose on Iran. Only if the Korea policy can be depicted as a success does the Iran policy not look like a path to failure. A long-ago British politician reputedly once explained the doctrine of cabinet collective government in these memorable terms: “It doesn’t matter what damn lie we tell, so long as we all tell the same damn lie.” The leaky Trump White House has seldom disciplined itself to converge upon a same damn lie. This time, though, they may really have no choice—and may have left the rest of the world with no choice except to pretend to believe them, as the only way to avert a disastrous war under a discredited president. (End text) Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/05/trump-north-korea-summit/560621/
