Please stop saying Trump-Kim was a success bc at least we’re talking; symbolism is important; last year was so much worse; and so on. Those are preposterously low thresholds for a leader-level summit. These are things you say after some diplomats meet at UN. The N Koreans /1
love to talk. They always want to yak and yak and issue statements. After 25 years of that, why does anyone consider never-ending process progress anymore? Esp at the summit level? Same with symbolism. How many ‘symbolic’ summits do we have to have bf we actually have, you /2
know, substance? As with the endless yakking, the Norks love lots of symbolism too. We know this. All those flags, handshakes, hugs, etc. make them look like a regular country, a peer equal to the US and the real Korea - you know, the not-1984 one without gulags. And the war /3
threat was created by Trump himself unnecessarily last year, so why is he getting credit for putting out a fire he created? After all these years, all that matters now is what costly signals PY sends. Will they give up any serious, of genuine positive strategic value to them? /4
So far everything we have gotten has been either status quo maintenance - the test ban - or small losses like the tunnel entrance destruction. A real concession wd be something like a gulag closure, cutting up missiles, giving us access to facilities, or even just giving us a /5
basic outline of what they have (# of missiles, # of warheads, locations of stuff, etc.). If we can’t get that sorta stuff, we should wait, i.e., contain & deter. This is why strategic patience was a far better idea than Obama ever got credit for.But instead, after 2 more /6
generic, anodyne ‘declarations’ this year, Trump offered up milex and even USFK, while Moon is talking about major joint economic projects and even IFI access. Can we please, PLEASE, get something real first before we do all this? END
