The North Korea Talks: Reason to be Concerned

If you’re on the right, many of your friends, like mine. There are people talking Nobel Prize, even though nothing has actually been accomplished. Jonah Golberg has a good run-down of likely problems, including the fact that there’s every reason to believe the North Koreans aren’t going to follow through on their pledge to denuclearize:

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ecause: North Korea has promised to do exactly that — with far more specificity — in the past. The actual paper agreement that Trump and Kim signed is not just worthless on its own, it’s less than worthless given that it literally recycles past worthless promises as if they are new ones. That’s contrary to the opinions of a lot of people on Twitter and TV who think — and feel — that this is Trump’s masterstroke. This isn’t a criticism of Trump. It’s just a simple recognition of reality. The Norks have bamboozled everyone else who extracted promises from them. By all means, let’s hope for the best. But North Korean duplicity is normal.

Allahpundit calls Trump out on agreeing to cancel “very provocative” war games with South Korea though more that he actually used the language of “provocative:

Calling U.S. military exercises with South Korea “very provocative” is a line straight out of the North Korean songbook. American hawks were aghast on social media this morning at the leader of the free world adopting Pyongyang’s rhetoric to describe something the U.S. and South Korea have every legal right to do. Trading a halt to those exercises for a halt to NorK nuke- and missile-testing (a “freeze for freeze”) is defensible, even if NK’s activities are illegal while ours aren’t, but framing them in the terms most favorable to Kim is yet another example of Trump gratuitously flattering the North rhetorically when he didn’t need to.

Speaking of flattering dictatorship, Jay Nordlinger addresses the human rights aspect and examines what’s wrong with Trump’s proclamation that Kim loves his people and they love him by going through the horrors of that regime. Nordlinger concludes:

Bukovsky, the great Soviet dissident, said something like this: “Free World governments should do what they have to do — but as they go about their business, they should occasionally pause to ask, ‘How will it look to the boys in the camps?’”

A lot of Americans care very much about the NFL and the national anthem. But standing up for American values means other things too, such as not perfuming one of the most disgusting and murderous tyrannies ever known to man.

I’m not someone who thinks Donald Trump can’t do anything right. His administration has done quite a few good things. However, to think he would flourish in a 1-on-1 setting with Kim require an industrial sized drink of Trump train kool aid. What is likely to come out of this Trump diplomacy is an agreement that North Koreans won’t follow, and overall Trump has given the North Koreans numerous propoganda victories and is unlikely to get anything out of it.