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Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin

(107,063 posts)
Sun May 27, 2018, 02:13 PM May 2018

Trump chose risky course with North Korea

President Donald Trump’s letter canceling his June 12 summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is a coy piece of manipulation — flattering and threatening Kim at the same time. It’s like the letters people send when breaking up a romance that hasn’t quite ripened. The words seem heartfelt, even as they stick in the knife.

“l was very much looking forward to being there with you,” Trump writes in the tone of a wounded suitor. “Sadly, based on the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in your most recent statement, I feel it is inappropriate, at this time, to have this long-planned meeting.”

And then the sober warning, responding to North Korea’s taunting challenge this week to “meet us at a meeting room or encounter us at a nuclear-to-nuclear showdown.” Answered Trump: “You talk about nuclear capabilities, but ours are so massive and powerful that I pray to God they will never have to be used.”

On balance, Trump may have been wise to back away from a meeting that he had seemed in recent weeks to want too much and to have prepared for too little — and to let Kim think for a while about the “great prosperity and wealth” he’s giving up in retaining his nuclear weapons. But Trump, as usual, has chosen a risky course. His letter could produce a renewed confrontation that would be damaging for U.S. relations with South Korea and China, in addition to resuming the brinksmanship with Pyongyang.

“This opens the door for Kim to play a much more complicated and nuanced game than we had wanted. We’ve dealt ourselves out,” warns Robert Carlin, a former CIA and State Department analyst who has visited Pyongyang more than 30 times.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/trump-chose-risky-course-with-north-korea/

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