Didn’t Dennis Rodman meet with Kim when he was president?
Or, was that President Camacho?
The thread demonstrates how few people are interested in foreign policy questions that don’t seem immediately pressing (for all the hype I doubt many people in the US really think NK is a pressing threat, though arguably it is). They are interested, if at all, in scoring points for their side of the partisan/tribal conflict, and foreign policy issues are just another forum to do that.
Similarly most of the media, with less of an excuse.
But the media hasn’t actually forgotten Clinton met with the previous Kim. AFAIK the media in general has stated enough times that the now scheduled summit meeting is the first between an NK leader and a sitting US president that they aren’t being very inaccurate if once in a while some talking head on TV fails to reiterate ‘sitting’.
Derangement against Obama certainly influenced some people’s view of his admin’s policy toward NK. OTOH it’s fairly clear he accomplished nothing. Nor did Bush, or Clinton while president, all in general terms. Trump has the advantage of any sitting president not far through his term that you can’t judge everything he might accomplish (or disasters cause) in the whole 4 or (to some God forbid, if they believed in a God) 8 years.
Criticizing Trump for giving ‘propaganda victories’ given to Kim though is pretty much TDS IMO. Even if it comes from ‘foreign policy experts’, often people for whom it will burn if Trump somehow accomplishes something. When they were on the inside nothing was accomplished. If Trump succeeds a part of them will be unhappy. This is human nature AFAIK, and some fluff about them being ‘dedicated public servants who would never wish anything but success for their country and govt’ is BS. Call that cynical if you like, I’ll call you naive if you really think it isn’t usually true. Human beings don’t like to see successors succeed where they failed. Again, not that Trump has succeeded yet, nor necessarily will.
But if there were to be a breakthrough with the DPRK, if the Kim mentality had really changed to being willing to accept assurances of non-regime change and big time aid/trade in exchange for real nuclear concessions, a big gigantic if obviously, it would only be really sounded out let alone actually negotiated one on one with a (sitting) US president. ‘Convention’ says you’d work up to that meeting with more than Pompeo’s meetings with Kim and Kim Yong Cheol’s trip to DC. But still there’s no way around the ‘NK propaganda victory’ of meeting with the DPRK leader at some point. Unless one thinks it can solved unilaterally by the US, what Trump was being excoriated for supposedly believing not long ago.
You could not be more wrong.
I don’t give a damn what side of our politics ‘scores points’ with this. I care about how my nation handles this and I’ve been watching this process for nearly 40 years.
If Trump makes any real progress here, ***lasting ***progress, I will be shocked and amazed. But all I see is that he’s falling into the same trap that every previous president but Obama fell into. It isn’t that Obama ‘accomplished nothing’, it is that he refused to play a game that has never accomplished anything but give aid and assistance to a rogue nation.
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Umm, nah I don’t think so generally. Doesn’t mean it applies to 100% of critics, but a lot it does.
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Let’s say that applies to you and not be needlessly personally contentious. I still don’t think it really applies entirely in most cases: TDS also enters in (as ODS entered in before).
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Obama really did accomplish nothing on NK. If you want to argue nothing was better than what Clinton and Bush accomplished, OK maybe. Trump has accomplished nothing yet, and he could also still accomplish worse than nothing. But, Obama accomplished nothing on NK: that’s clear.
The basic idea under Obama I believe was we simply ignore as much as possible NK attaining nuclear strike capability against the US and simply deter it with our own nuclear capability once they have it. As the least worst solution to a problem with no good solution. That’s not a crazy, but I think there was an honestly gap in not being willing to say that that’s what the policy was. And there’s some reflexive defense of party/tribe in saying Obama was really doing something when he clearly was not.
The idea that we could ‘do something about it’ is fallacious. We cannot nor could we have bombed or invaded North Korea, any fantasies aside. China has made it abundantly clear, even directly spelling it out for Trump, that if WE start a war with North Korea, they will not stay neutral.