Let’s see if we can piece this together:
1. It is good that the US and North Korea are talking. It’s vastly better to have Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un chuckling to one another than lobbing threats of nuclear war at one another.
1. It is good that the US and North Korea are talking. It’s vastly better to have Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un chuckling to one another than lobbing threats of nuclear war at one another.
2. Tuesday’s “agreement” was almost entirely free of any substance. For a guy who has heavily criticized the Iran deal and previous agreements with North Korea, Trump’s big achievement amounts to much less than those previous agreements.
3. Any actual progress toward denuclearization is going to be negotiated between Kim and Moon Jae-in or in multilateral talks. As it should be, since South Korea and Japan have far more skin in this game than does the United States.
4. Related, if Trump really suspended joint exercises with South Korea without first running it past the South Koreans, that’s a very bad sign about where his head is at in these talks. “America First” is not the appropriate mindset here.
5. As far as his other “concessions” to Kim, which mostly have to do with optics, it depends on what happens next. North Korea has suffered far more at US hands than vice versa, so a little indulgence isn’t entirely beyond the pale.
That said, if this process breaks down, if at the end of the day there is no denuclearization, North Korea doesn’t start to remedy its incredibly bad human rights behavior, etc., then we can say that yes, the flags, the handshake, the yukking it up on camera were all bad ideas.
6. There is absolutely no reason to believe that Donald Trump and his foreign policy team can actually park this deal. Far more likely now that they kick the can to the next president, which might be preferable to the alternatives.
7. People on the left and right and center who are criticizing this summit on principle need to explain what they would’ve preferred, because six months ago we were on a path to war and this seems a lot better than that.
Better thread:
