Why Trump's Boasts About the Korea Summit Are Premature

By Robin Wright, The New Yorker

28 April 18

 

Robin Wright in this piece references remarks by former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Abraham Denmark. Abraham "Abe" Denmark while studying International Security at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver in 2002, 2003 was also a team member of ours at Truthout. After graduating Abe moved on to take a job at the State Department under then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, herself a DU alumni. - Marc Ash, Reader Supported News

OREAN WAR TO END!” President Trump declared in a Friday-morning tweet celebrating the Korean summit. “After a furious year of missile launches and Nuclear testing, a historic meeting between North and South Korea is now taking place. Good things,” he boasted, “are happening.”

The meeting was indeed an adrenaline-pumping affair, centered on a political odd couple. South Korea’s President, Moon Jae-In, whose parents fled North Korea, is a former human-rights lawyer of humble origins. His father worked in a prisoner-of-war camp; he spent his early years strapped to his mother’s back as she sold eggs. As a student, he went to jail for protesting authoritarian rule in South Korea, only to be elected President in a democratic election, in 2017. The North Korean leader, Kim Jung Un, is one of the world’s worst abusers of human rights, including allegedly ordering the murder of his brother and uncle. In a land of chronic deprivation, he is a product of rare privilege and a Swiss boarding-school education. He is the third generation of a dynasty that has ruled Pyongyang for seven decades.

Moon and Kim lead countries that have technically been at war since 1950. The conflict was one of the twentieth century’s bloodiest, killing more than two million Koreans, more than thirty-three thousand Americans, and six hundred thousand Chinese, among others. So the mere sight of the two leaders extending arms as they approached the demilitarized zone was heartening. In a richly choreographed opening, Kim stepped across a wide cement curb that divides the two nations, shook hands with Moon, then escorted him briefly and symbolically back across the curb, into the North. They both walked into the village of Panmunjom for a day of talks. Both beamed. They were escorted to the Peace House, the venue for the talks, by an honor guard in uniforms from the nineteenth century, when the Korean Peninsula was unified. The guards carried spears and swords—but no guns—on one of the world’s most fortified frontiers.

It wasn’t the first meeting of the leaders of the two countries, although it was the first visit to the South by a North Korean ruler. The meeting provided a rare glimpse of a possible—if not yet probable—détente after a year of sometimes breathless escalation, occasionally fuelled by Trump’s tweets. He once lambasted Kim as “little rocket man.” In January, he tweeted, “North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times. Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”

The tenor of exchanges shifted abruptly after Kim reached out to South Korea and the U.S. in the New Year, for reasons that are still not completely clear. The inter-Korean talks on Friday were intended, in part, to pave the way for a summit between Trump and Kim by the end of June.

“Things have changed very radically from a few months ago, the name-calling and other things,” Trump said at a joint press conference with the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel. “Something very dramatic could happen.” Trump praised President Xi Jinping, of China, for his help in pressuring Pyongyang. He refused to say whether he had already communicated directly with Kim, but he said talks to determine a venue for a meeting have been narrowed down to two sites. “We’re setting up meetings now,” the President said. “I have a responsibility to see if I can do it. If I can’t, it’ll be a very tough time for a lot of countries and a lot of people. It’s something I hope I can do for the world.”

In a flowery joint statement, the two Koreas pledged to stop hostile acts against each other, to work toward formally ending the war by the year’s end, and to create a future of “complete denuclearization” in the Peninsula. The Panmunjom Declaration, as the statement was dubbed, said that “improving and cultivating inter-Korean relations is the prevalent desire of the whole nation and the urgent calling of the times that cannot be held back any further.” The two Koreas also vowed to increase reunions between families that have been split since the war, reconnect an inter-Korean railway, field a joint team for the 2018 Asian Games, and open a new liaison office in North Korea. President Moon agreed to visit Pyongyang in the fall.

Afterward, Kim declared that the two nations are “linked by blood as a family and compatriots who cannot live separately.” The two men embraced. The summitry—and the principles it produced—was widely welcomed, albeit with many caveats.

“Dialogue at this moment is certainly better than a march to war,” Wendy Sherman, a senior State Department official during the Clinton and Obama Administrations, who travelled to North Korea with then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, in 2000, told me. “That said, we all need to keep our expectations in check.”

“Kim has grasped the hand of Moon principally because he has the nuclear weapons and the delivery system for those weapons and can now turn his attention to the economic future of North Korea,” Sherman said. “No doubt the many years of sanctions, further intensified in the past months, have had an impact on the North, but Kim remains in the driver’s seaton the way ahead.”

Kim has already received much of what he sought in his overtures to the outside world—and so far has given up nothing. While his star rose on the international stage, Kim was invited for a state visit to China; he was feted as a hero by his southern rival; and he is due to meet with a sitting American President, which his grandfather and father both sought to do, unsuccessfully. “Not a bad set of plays for a leader of a cult more than a country,” Sherman, a nuclear-weapons expert, told me.

The biggest issue is still the ill-defined term “denuclearization.” President Trump recently defined it as getting rid of North Korea’s entire nuclear program—lock, stock, centrifuges, and bombs. In 1992, the North and South also issued a joint declaration on “denuclearization”—the first time the term was used—because the word “disarmament” was unacceptable, Sherman noted. Whether Kim totally surrenders—as he might see it—every aspect of the one tool that insures the survival of his regime will be the ultimate test of the talks.

The three-page Panmunjom Declaration is “breathtaking in its scope and ambition,” David Albright, the president of the Institute for Science and International Security, told me in an e-mail. It includes no immediate roadblocks or limits, and no sign that South Korea will reduce sanctions on the North. But the means to achieving denuclearization are left vague. “Unless a firm foundation and plan for North Korea’s complete verified irreversible nuclear disarmament is laid out with a relatively short schedule (two-three years), most of the other commitments in the declaration are merely wishes,” he wrote.

The success of Friday’s Korean summit will add to the pressure on Trump to make further progress when he meets Kim, the first meeting between a sitting U.S. President and North Korea. The touchy-feely stuff is over. Now the hard part begins, Abraham Denmark, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense who is now the director of the Wilson Center’s Asia Program, told me. “An agreement between North Korea and the U.S. will need to include a detailed roadmap for a way forward, including each side’s concessions,” he said. “Seoul will likely press Washington to mirror the optimism and vision we saw at Panmunjom. It remains unclear if the Trump Administration will go along with symbolism or focus on specifics and substance.”

North Korea, Denmark added, is still North Korea. “Kim is still the same person he was when he purged potential rivals, imprisoned thousands of his people, and had his relatives killed. This was a hopeful moment, but extreme caution is well warranted.” For all the buoyant optimism generated by the Panmunjom talks, he said, “there are innumerable opportunities for failure.”

Extra! French Poodle Bites Puffed-Up Yank in the Ass

By Mort Rosenblum, Reader Supported News

28 April 18

 

ust back from America, I lit up the TV to hear a presidential president, in complete English sentences free of personal pronouns, tell Congress how the United States was destroying a world that badly needs its leadership.

Emmanuel Macron hit all the right notes, hammering away at every tenet of Donald Trump’s twisted us-first jingoism. He played French poodle for two days, lavishing faux-adulation and kissing cheeks. Then, when it mattered, he bit his host in the ass.

A tweet from Madeleine Albright caught the irony: “It has been too long since a President delivered a speech in Washington about the need to defend democracy and support international cooperation.”

Macron banged away at his central theme, linking the Iran deal, Syria, trade, desperate people on the move, and all the rest.

“Isolationism, withdrawal and nationalism” prevent common answers to global threats, he said. Without updated alliances the vital institutions America built – the U.N. and NATO – could collapse. Authoritarians would quickly fill the vacuum.

“Your role was decisive in creating and safeguarding the free world,” he added, “The United States … invented this multilateralism. You are the one who has to help to preserve and reinvent it.”

Macron’s zinger – “There is no Planet B” – brought all but partisan diehards to their feet:

“Some people think that securing current industries and their jobs is more urgent than transforming our economies to meet the challenge of global change. But we must find a transition to a low-carbon economy. What is the meaning of our life, really, if we work and live destroying the planet, while sacrificing the future of our children?”

If Americans were not too caught up in their own theater of the absurd to take in Macron’s message, and if the French weren’t so tied up in knots of their own making, I’d have uncorked a bottle of Côte Rôtie and gone to bed happy.

Instead, I communed with my best non-breaking news source, Emiliano the aged olive tree, who is struggling to recover from the weirdest winter in memory: biblical rains and a hard freeze after prolonged deadly drought.

Up in Paris, a houseboat just hit something sharp in the Seine and sank. The river is suddenly disastrously low, after months of freak flooding that peaked at 12 feet above normal. Any farmer knows the gravity of such unpredictable extremes.

But Trump is immovable. He excluded Democrats from Macron’s White House visit. At a press scrum he called on a Fox News stooge to pitch a puffball so he could yell at congressmen who dared to question his dubious top-level staff appointments.

Nonstop cable babble, meantime, focused on which particular women Trump had boinked, overlooking the fact that he is screwing an entire planet. Climate and food security are only part of it. Look, for instance, at Macron’s home ground.

I flew back early, just missing yet another strike that has already cost Air France nearly $500 million. Then I drove down; featherbedded train crews are snarling traffic at least until June, throwing the economy – and daily life – into a spin.

Macron, a 40-year-old financial rock star who rode in on a landslide last May, dropped to Trump popularity levels in the fall, and is now just under 50 percent. Detractors say that, like Trump, he wants to curb workers’ rights to reward the rich.

This matters to us all. France is among the last brand-name nations that temper their capitalism with “social contracts.” Employees expect to be regarded as more than widgets and raw material on companies’ books.

Nicolas Sarkozy led France to the right, but voters dumped him as too high-handed and not presidential. He now faces trial for corruption and influence peddling linked to his campaign. Francois Hollande tried to soak the poor but then reversed himself.

The balance is precarious. France is indulgent with crippling strikes, but patience is growing thin. Students are protesting education reform, with stricter entry exams, and leftist leaders threaten a reprise of those 1968 battles in Paris streets.

And this comes back to America. French universities are free, and so is health care. The socialist gulag Republicans sneer at could be a model state if extremes on both sides found common ground. But a transatlantic tug to the right inflames the left.

Macron went to Washington on behalf of the European Union. Trump snubs Angela Merkel, weakened at home because she took in so many of the refugees that America uprooted yet refuses asylum. Fascists in the EU want a Fortress Europe.

This is far bigger than personalities and individual states. Macron is right: Despots seize on every opening to reshape the world into something ugly and dangerous, with a muzzled press, cowed populations and plunder of global resources.

And yet too many Americans miss the point. Even The New York Times mostly blew off the Macron visit, playing it at the bottom of the front page, or inside, with a focus on Melania, pomp, and dandruff.

In France, dailies were also low-key, partly because the French expect so little of Trump. Some dwelt on restored grandeur after the George W. Bush era, when Bart Simpson laughed them off as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys.”

Le Monde’s lead story revealed how the Islamic State burrowed into Syria and Iraq to exact taxes and infiltrate businesses. By one estimate, it has 15 years of cash reserves. Le Figaro and Liberation detailed how Trump policy fuels anti-Semitism.

Back in America, too many people ferociously defend worldviews based on fragments of information from dubious sources that confirm personal bias. Even solid news organizations can only sample events and trends that imperil us.

We need to step back to assess what is at risk – and why. This takes time and commitment. But how else do we choose leaders who understand the real world and then hold them to their promises? In sum, we need to grasp context and history.

Start with an immensely readable pair of books by Yuval Noah Hariri, an Israeli who gets it. The first outlines how we evolved from slime. The second outlines how we might avoid reversing the process: “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.”

Terrorists, Hariri writes, are like flies seeking to destroy a china shop. They can’t. But if they enrage a bull, it does the job for them. In 2010, terrorists killed 7,697 people, few of them in rich countries. Obesity and related illness killed three million. Coca-Cola is far more dangerous than Al Qaeda.

ISIS was spawned by U.S. torture during the Iraq War, and it spread in the chaos that followed. Local forces, with U.S. and allied support, took back its territory. Now it is a swarm of flies that depends on that bull. You see where I’m going here.

Trump, if ignorant, is hardly stupid. “Terrorism,” a perfect bogey, enables him to undo democratic guarantees and freedoms that go back two centuries. He only needs his deplorable base and apathetic non-voters in crucial states to be reelected.

Hariri’s thesis applies to all that matters, from income inequality to nuclear threat to climate chaos. The more we allow Trumpian lies, misconceptions and flip-flops from past positions to stand, the more his fake narrative hardens into ineluctable reality.

On Friday, Trump arose early and picked up his dumb phone. He ignored huge news from Korea to tweet yet again about James Comey, who did more than anyone to get him elected. Then he congratulated himself for doing what South Korea and China did to find accord with Kim Jong-un. Mainly, they deflected Trump’s shoving match.

What happens next involves intricate diplomacy taking in not only the Korean Peninsula but also the South China Sea and Asia beyond. Think about U.S. policy shaped by John Bolton, Mike Pompeo and clueless warmongers in Congress.

If I’ve worn out that Edmund Burke quote – “Evil triumphs when good men do nothing” – consider Albert Einstein: “The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.”

That was Macron’s message in Washington. As some fear in France, he may suffer from Napoleon envy, and he likes being in the saddle. But, neither a fool nor an egomaniac, he knows the difference between a horse’s ass and a horse.

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Mort Rosenblum has reported from seven continents as Associated Press special correspondent, edited the International Herald Tribune in Paris, and written 14 books on subjects ranging from global geopolitics to chocolate. He now runs MortReport.org.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.