I feel obliged to reiterate my contention that Donald Trump holding a summit with Kim Jong-un is only as historic as the infamous one Neville Chamberlain held with Adolf Hitler. And, like Chamberlain’s “peace in our time,” Trump’s “everybody can now feel much safer … sleep well tonight” will live in infamy. Because, just as Hitler never ended his military aggression, Kim will never end his nuclear program.
Not to mention the manifest folly of hailing Trump for diffusing fears of nuclear conflagration on the Korean Peninsula. After all, he himself ignited those fears with his juvenile insults and reckless threats, which included calling Kim “Rocket Man” and threatening to rain down “fire and fury” on North Korea, respectively. The proverb of the infernal arsonist claiming credit for putting out his own fires comes to mind.
I also feel obliged to reiterate this admonition I gave 12 years ago in “Why Do World Leaders Even Give North Korea’s President the Time of Day,” October 4, 2006.
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North Korean President Kim Jong-Il is a temperamental and insecure man. Only this explains his habit of making nuclear threats from time to time. Whenever he does, he commands the international attention he craves so pathologically and extorts the aid his people need so desperately. …
When it comes to psychological warfare, this North Korean gnome manages to jerk the world’s chain every time. Indeed, true to form, statements of concern from world leaders about what Kim might do followed his antic declaration with Pavlovian predictability. But one wonders why — given his record of idle threats — these world leaders even give him the time of day. …
Even if Kim possesses nuclear weapons – as he professes, like Saddam Hussein, he will use them on his own people to maintain absolute grip on power before launching a preemptive attack on South Korea, let alone on his useful boogeyman, the United States. And, it is far more likely that fanatical Taliban sympathizers in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) would share nuclear technology or even nuclear weapons with terrorists before the devoutly hedonistic Kim does. …
Cold War tensions between the US and Soviet Union never provoked leaders of either country to violate the universally accepted nuclear doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). Likewise, no matter how much North Korea provokes tensions with the United States, we have good reason to believe that Kim would never dare violate that doctrine. …
The US and other world leaders should quit coddling him every time he throws a temper tantrum.
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Like father, like son …
That said, not since George W. Bush said he trusts Russia’s Putin has a president of the United States seemed so stupid and naïve as Trump seemed today, when he said he trusts North Korea’s Kim:
I do trust him, yeah. … I think that he really wants to do a great job for North Korea. I think he wants to de-nuke.
(ABC News, June 12, 2018)
Of course, Putin really wanted to do a great job for Russia too. And he has – wielding as he now does the kind of totalitarian control over Russia that would make Joseph Stalin green with envy.
Frankly, the only thing Trump has to show from this summit is a historic photo op; whereas Kim can show that the leader of the free world has not only normalized his reign of terror but given him license to reign on.
‘Systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations have been and are being committed’ by the leaders of North Korea against their own people, the U.N.’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights declared Monday in a report that goes on to accuse that nation’s communist regime of ‘crimes against humanity.’
According to U.N. investigators, ‘the gravity, scale and nature of these violations reveal a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world.’
(NPR, February 14, 2018)
This Nazi-grade barbarity is why none of Trump’s predecessors would even talk to Kim; that is, unless he committed to “complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization” (CVID) and ending these crimes against humanity.
Incidentally, Obama made Iran jump through these CVID hoops to reach the nuclear deal he brokered. Yet Trump ridiculed that deal as the worst in the history of mankind. Now, in trademark Trumpian fashion, he’s trying to spin the deal he just struck with North Korea as the best. In truth, Obama’s is to prime steak as Trump’s is to Swiss cheese.
But don’t get me started on the way Republican politicians and conservative pundits are turning themselves into intellectual pretzels trying to defend this historic feat of appeasement. Suffice it to know that, if Obama had done what Trump just did, congressional Republicans would have initiated impeachment proceedings, accusing Obama of betraying not just national security but American values to boot. And they would not have shown him the courtesy of waiting until he landed back on US soil to do so.
As it happens, I began beating this dead horse long before Trump was even elected. I refer you to such commentaries as “Evangelicals Supporting Trump Like Israelites Worshipping Golden Calf,” January 20, 2016, and “Now Chief of Staff Kelly ‘Spicers’ Himself for Trump re Sgt. La David Johnson,” October 20, 2017.
Remarkably, Trump has shown time and again that there is nothing he would not do, nor any principle he would not sacrifice, for his own self-aggrandizement and glorification. (No doubt he has visions of Trump hotels framing North Korea’s decaying skyline and Trump golf courses defiling its virgin countryside….)
Here, for example, is how I decried his epic flip-flop on China – swinging from accusing it of raping the United States to praising it for doing so:
Idle flattery could get this narcissist to sell out his mother. Therefore, it’s no surprise that being feted with such pomp and circumstance got him to sell out his country. …
Trump has embarrassed and demeaned the United States like nobody has ever seen before. For this has to be the first time in history that a US president traveled to the capital of a foreign adversary and lavished it with praise for ‘raping’ the United States.
(“Trump Congratulates China for Raping US,” The iPINIONS Journal, November 9, 2017)
Apropos of which, Kim knew all he had to do was to stroke Trump’s ego. This he duly did by telling him that he’s doing something no other US president was able [while thinking stupid enough] to do. That’s all it took for Trump to give Kim everything he wanted and demand nothing (of any substance) in return.
Frankly, only delusions of grandeur explain his wrecking-ball approach to US alliances that have been the bedrock of a peaceful world order since World War II. He threw this into tectonic relief last weekend, when he willfully wrecked a G7 meeting in Canada.
Donald Trump has left the G7 network of global cooperation in disarray after he pulled the US out of a previously agreed summit communique, blaming the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau whom he derided as ‘dishonest and weak’.
The US president, who arrived at the summit in Canada late and left early to fly to Singapore to prepare for his summit with Kim Jong-un, shocked fellow leaders with a bellicose press conference on Saturday in which he attacked the trade policies of other countries.
(The Guardian, June 9, 2018)
And so he ignited a trade war with America’s most trusted allies as foreplay to signing a slapdash nuclear deal with America’s most deceptive enemy? #Dope!
Then came the wrecking ball he took to America’s longstanding alliance with South Korea with this shock-and-awe declaration:
Donald Trump has unexpectedly vowed that the US will end ‘war games’ on the Korean peninsula, as he said America is ‘prepared to start a new history’ with North Korea after holding a historic summit with Kim Jong-un.
(The Telegraph, June 12, 2018)
In other words, in exchange for Kim’s patently specious promise to de-nuke, Trump agreed to dismantle the military alliance that has kept North Korea’s military aggression in check since the end of the Korean War. Worse still, he made this agreement without even discussing it with the president of South Korea, affirming the Trump doctrine, which The Atlantic quoted a White House official (in its June 11 edition) saying is:
We’re America, bitch!
But perhaps nothing betrayed how thoroughly he caved quite like Trump parroting Kim’s propaganda. Specifically, he indignantly referred to these joint US-South Korea (defensive) military exercises (to be “ready to fight tonight”) as provocative war games.
Despite their own provocative military maneuvers throughout the region, North Korea and China have always decried these exercises, which have been conducted for decades, as a regional military threat.
To be fair, Trump insists that this does not mean withdrawing all US troops from South Korea. But leaving them there under these new terms would be tantamount to turning them into little more than terracotta warriors.
Trust me, Kim and his totalitarian allies, most notably the leaders of Russia and China, are the only ones who think this summit was a success. In fact, President Xi Jinping wasted no time in signaling China’s intent to lead efforts at the United Nations to normalize trade relations with North Korea.
This not only undermines but makes a mockery of Trump’s threat to continue “maximum pressure” with economic sanctions until Kim cries uncle. #DopeWasDuped!
Related commentaries:
Why do leaders give Kim time of day…
Fire and fury…
Trump leading from behind…
Evangelical leaders…
Kelly Spicers Himself…
Kim cuckolds Trump…
China raping US…
* This commentary was originally published on Tuesday, June 12, at 8:47 a.m.