Monday, February 25, 2019

Response to Just Saying Things

(See: Just Above Sunset: Just Saying Things)

"'If not for me, we would now be at War with North Korea!’, Trump tweeted last summer. He seems to see his legacy in part as the great peacemaker of the Korean Peninsula and recently boasted that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Oh, for Christ’s sake! Please! Does this man seriously think all of his self-centered jibber-jabber did anybody any good?

I hate to rain on his award ceremony, but this is just another example of the rooster trying to take credit for the sunrise. Here’s the real history of Trump and North Korea, in a nutshell:

Back in 1994, according to the non-partisan Arms Control Association, President Bill Clinton made a deal with North Korea called the Agreed Framework, "calling upon Pyongyang to freeze operation and construction of nuclear reactors suspected of being part of a covert nuclear weapons program in exchange for two proliferation-resistant nuclear power reactors. The agreement also called upon the United States to supply North Korea with fuel oil pending construction of the reactors”, seemingly with the goal that North Korea might eventually integrate into the world community as a non-nuclear citizen nation. The only alternative to the Framework, for North Korea, would be to build enough nuclear weaponry that could eventually hit all of the United States.

The “Framework" worked fine until the George W Bush administration came into power, determined to undo anything Bill Clinton had done, and let the North Koreans know that things would be different around here from now on. This prompted North Korea, possibly immediately, to start secretly enriching uranium, something the Bush people found out about in late 2002.
Rather than confront the North Koreans and demand they halt their efforts to create a uranium enrichment capability, the intelligence findings gave those in the Bush administration who opposed the Agreed Framework a reason to abandon it. John Bolton, then-undersecretary of state for arms control and international security under President Bush, later wrote that “this was the hammer I had been looking for to shatter the Agreed Framework.”
Bolton may have had other plans, but all that really mattered at that point was North Korea’s Plan B — that is, to get back to building enough nuclear weapons capable of hitting all of the United States, from sea to shining sea. That’s what they did, and that's where we are now.

Anything that anybody, including the president of the United States, did during the time it took North Korea to accomplish their goal was superfluous. All of those bombastic threats, followed by all the nice-nice "love" talk from both sides? Just part of the show.

And the truth is — something only Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats seems to have the guts to allude to out loud — all the United States can do now is learn to live with a nuclear North Korea.

Forget Nobel Peace Prizes for either of those two, which indeed they both might actually get, but not because either comes close to deserving it — Trump, because he’s been nothing but a feckless bit player in a pas de deux completely choreographed by the Kims for all of these years; and Kim, because he’s now made the world a more dangerous place.

Although yes, there’s still the possibility that Trump could screw this up, pretty much by doing just about anything at all — withdrawing troops from South Korea, for example. We might just come off okay out of all this if Trump could learn to just sit on his hands, keep whatever he’s thinking inside his head, and otherwise do nothing at all.

Just leave things the way they are. They’re not going to get better, but with luck, and maybe a bit of presidential will power, they won’t get worse.