.@GrecianFormula is very kind, but I must say that I just don't see much different coming regarding North Korea with a Biden victory. So I am not sure how much I am adding here.
The big story for me about Trump, and SK President Moon's, engagement with NK is HOW LITTLE it has /1
The big story for me about Trump, and SK President Moon's, engagement with NK is HOW LITTLE it has /1
changed. Since 2017, I've been going to panels and events where I've heard dozens of powerpoints and talks about how everything is gonna to be different, that Moon is breaking through, how Trump's transactional, non-ideological approach to diplomacy opened new doors and so on. /2
Moon's rhetoric particularly was just soaring; I remembered being invited to speak at a National Assembly conference on ending the Korean War officially. And another on all the projects SK was going to do with NK. And then NK was going to join the IMF and World Bank too. /3
I routinely objected - as I have here on Twitter for years - that NK was still the DPRK and that Trump was a ridiculous, unserious, appeaser-for-TV-ratings bargaining partner. I don't think that Trump's rank dilettantishness ever quite sank in with this ROK government (which /4
is compliment actually. S Koreans never quite believed we would elect someone so totally unfit.)
Anyway, two of my favorite retorts in all this were that I was a 'cold war dinosaur' and an 'old-style hawk.' There was a depressing amount of personalization, perhaps because the /5
Anyway, two of my favorite retorts in all this were that I was a 'cold war dinosaur' and an 'old-style hawk.' There was a depressing amount of personalization, perhaps because the /5
stake seemed so high.
And yet here we are after almost 4 years of Trumpian flim-flam and Moon bending over backwards to accommodate Pyongyang, even violating the free speech rights of NK defectors - and almost nothing on the ground has changed.
You can argue that all this /6
And yet here we are after almost 4 years of Trumpian flim-flam and Moon bending over backwards to accommodate Pyongyang, even violating the free speech rights of NK defectors - and almost nothing on the ground has changed.
You can argue that all this /6
might have worked if Trump - incompetent, acclaim-seeking, disinterested, insouciant - weren't POTUS. Were Obama negotiating with Kim Jong Un, it would have gone much differently. Perhaps - and the dovish left will cleave to this explanation. But I'd reckon that centrists and /7
hawks on NK will take away the lesson that negotiating with NK is a fool's errand - Trump being the most recent fool - and that containment, deterrence, sanction & isolation are really the only viable options until the DRPK leadership liberalizes. And given that Biden is a /8
pretty establishment guy, I bet that this is what he'll fall back on. /9
