North Korea: what else is new?

Trump is learning the hard way

The White House appears to have been caught off guard by North Korea’s suspension of talks with South Korea – and Pyongyang’s suggestion that it might ditch plans for Kim Jong Un’s meeting with President Trump, too. The reason for Kim’s cold feet? The White House’s public efforts to hold his feet to the fire, suggests Donald Kirk for the Daily Beast.

“The image of a bunch of nosy foreigners poking around hundreds of caves and redoubts and tunnels where the North Koreans may be stashing [nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles] is fantasy. It’s not going to happen. Not as long as Kim is in charge,” Kirk writes.

“The dreams of a deal whereby Kim sees the light, acquiesces and bows down in talks with Trump may have been encouraged by one gesture the North Koreans are making. That’s the closure and destruction of the nuclear test site at Punggye-ri, in a mountainous region far northeast of Pyongyang, to be carried out between May 23 and May 25. That’s going to be a tremendous event, live on TV, but it’s all for show.

“The site, where North Korea has conducted all six of its nuclear tests, is presumed no longer usable.”

Does this look like Libya? North Korea isn’t going to give up its nuclear weapons for nothing, the Korea Times editorializes. It has seen how that story plays out.

“Of course, the Kim regime must have been displeased with US calls for complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization. The North is opposing US moves to apply a Libya-style denuclearization formula, under which the African country transferred all of its fissile materials to the US for dismantling. The North apparently opposes such a formula, believing the Moammar Gadhafi regime collapsed because it gave up its nuclear ambitions.”

Why We Might All Have to Play Make Believe With Kim

South Korea may have snookered President Trump into agreeing to a summit with Kim Jong Un “before he understood the full implications of what he had done,” writes David Frum in The Atlantic. But now that the administration has started down this road, we might all be better off pretending that it’s a smooth ride—however bumpy it gets.

“US options in the Korean peninsula depend heavily on the cooperation of South Korea. Trump has now thoroughly frightened and alienated South Korean opinion. South Korea’s dovish president, Moon Jae-in, was elected with only 41 percent of the vote. Polls now show his approval rating in the mid-70s, because of his success in drawing Trump away from ‘fire and fury’ and toward negotiations,” Frum writes.

“The South Korean leadership is not only seeking to constrain Trump’s options—it is advertising that constraint to the world. In August 2017, Moon asserted a veto over any US military operations on the peninsula. Maybe Moon can enforce that veto. Maybe not. But US strategic planners have been put on notice that America’s most important ally in this theater wants no part of a Trump-led war. Under the circumstances, pretending to believe in the success of a Trump-Kim summit may become the least-bad option inside the Pentagon as well as in Seoul.”

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