Good morning Korea - how's Trump doing?

[_Chap]

An interesting article:

Trump is dangerous again as his Kim Jong-un ‘breakthrough’ turns sour: Faced by the collapse of his only diplomatic ‘achievement’ and worried about support at home, the president could go rogue.

"... faced by the imminent collapse of his signal diplomatic “achievement” and worried about his standing among supporters ahead of November’s mid-term elections, Trump may revert to his previous, reckless posture. It is less than a year since he threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea by raining “fire and fury” on its civilian population. If Trump goes rogue again, there may be no coming back this time."

Is this unexpected? Alas, no. It was blindingly obvious from the start that things would go this way. The USA has an ignorant and thoughtless narcissist with his finger on the nuclear button. If things carry on falling apart and Trump comes to the conclusion that nuking North Korea will look good on Fox and Friends the next morning, what might he not choose to do?

Remember all the hoo-ha over Donald Trump’s summit in June with North Korea’s maverick dictator, Kim Jong-un? With typical immodesty, Trump proclaimed a historic diplomatic breakthrough. Overnight, his Love Island-style tryst in Singapore had made the world a better place. “Everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office,” Trump tweeted. “There is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea.”

Hogwash. North Korea is fast emerging as the definitive example of how Trump takes a pre-existing international crisis and makes it worse. Claiming negotiating skills and a political prescience he does not possess, lacking thought-through and coherent strategies and ignoring the experience of more knowledgeable predecessors, he crassly blunders into sensitive situations, loud mouth blaring. US policy in Iran, Syria and Palestine has been similarly, anarchically upended.

The shattering of the false hopes raised by Trump in Singapore has not taken long. In a letter delivered last week, Kim reportedly threatened to resume nuclear weapons and missile tests. Talks on denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula – the summit’s sole, vaguely tangible outcome – have stalled. Their future is “again at stake and may fall apart”, the letter said, because Trump had reneged on understandings reached with Kim and subsequently zig-zagged to a harder position.

In familiar knee-jerk fashion, Trump responded by scrapping a visit to North Korea by his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo. He then publicly blamed China, not his own muddled messages, for undermining the US-led sanctions policy of “maximum pressure”. The Pentagon followed up on Tuesday by suggesting that joint allied military exercises in the Korean theatre – suspended by Trump in a high-handed and unreciprocated concession – might soon resume.

Quite how Trump expects the talks to succeed if he bans his top diplomat from talking is unclear. Exactly why Trump believes China – with much at stake in North Korea – will follow his lead on sanctions while he simultaneously wages a trade war on Beijing is a mystery. And how long he can keep on pretending the nuclear menace is over, when the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency reports authoritatively that it is not?

The implosion of Trump’s deceptive Korean “breakthrough” risks some dreadful consequences. One is the sabotaging of separate, commendable efforts by Moon Jae-in, South Korea’s president, to restore bilateral trust and cooperation. American bungling has thrown into question Moon’s planned visit to Pyongyang next month – and has certainly rendered it more difficult. Another key ally, Japan, has no illusions, dismissing Trump’s big triumph as a flop. North Korea continued to pose a “serious and imminent” threat, Tokyo declared this week.

Trump’s over-reaching, and subsequent reneging, is likely to enrage the Pyongyang regime, where hardliners are already crying betrayal. Kim himself may feel humiliated by Trump’s failure to fulfil dangled promises about a peace treaty or formal diplomatic recognition. The result could be a redoubling of the north’s efforts to build weapons of mass destruction and a rapid reigniting of regional military tensions.

Most dangerously of all, faced by the imminent collapse of his signal diplomatic “achievement” and worried about his standing among supporters ahead of November’s mid-term elections, Trump may revert to his previous, reckless posture. It is less than a year since he threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea by raining “fire and fury” on its civilian population. If Trump goes rogue again, there may be no coming back this time.

For now at least, US diplomats say they are not giving up on denuclearisation and detente. And it may be that Kim is playing hardball in a bid to win more concessions prior to resuming talks. But such calculations ignore Trump’s volatile temperament and aggressive instincts. He could lose it at any moment. Meanwhile, it’s vital to nail the lie, promulgated on the Republican right, that his chaotic foreign policy is working.

The deleterious impact of the “Trump effect” on other international hotspots can be seen in Palestine, where his funding cuts and tilt towards Israel over Jerusalem have rendered the peace process moribund. It is evident in Syria, too, where Russia’s bombers, unbelievably, have been given free rein; and in Iran, the undeserving target of unrestrained, highly provocative (and arguably illegal) American economic warfare.

Trump, who continues to address tweets to his supposed pal “Chairman Kim” is not the first American president to personalise foreign policy, convinced that he, uniquely, has the insight and charisma required to solve problems others believe insoluble. In maintaining, without any evidence, that he alone knows how to “handle” Kim, Trump follows in the footsteps of Franklin Roosevelt, who nurtured a similar conceit about Joseph “Uncle Joe” Stalin. In the event, as the historian Antony Beevor has recorded, Stalin ran rings around Roosevelt in 1945 when negotiating the postwar European order. Trump’s naïve and egotistic blundering threatens more made-in-America disasters from east Asia to the Middle East and Europe.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

What tweets are we talking about with this breathless excoriation of Mr. Trump?

https://Twitter.com/realDonaldTrump?ref ... r%5Eauthor

- Doc

[_canpakes]

WASHINGTON — North Korea is moving ahead with its ballistic missile program at 16 hidden bases that have been identified in new commercial satellite images, a network long known to American intelligence agencies but left undiscussed as President Trump claims to have neutralized the North’s nuclear threat.

The satellite images suggest that the North has been engaged in a great deception: It has offered to dismantle a major launching site — a step it began, then halted — while continuing to make improvements at more than a dozen others that would bolster launches of conventional and nuclear warheads.

The existence of the ballistic missile bases, which North Korea has never acknowledged, contradicts Mr. Trump’s assertion that his landmark diplomacy is leading to the elimination of a nuclear and missile program that the North had warned could devastate the United States

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/us/p ... bases.html

[_Chap]

Oh!!! I am, like so, so surprised!!!

And this:

“It’s not like these bases have been frozen,” Mr. Cha, the leader of the team that studied the images, said in an interview. “Work is continuing. What everybody is worried about is that Trump is going to accept a bad deal — they give us a single test site and dismantle a few other things, and in return they get a peace agreement” that formally ends the Korean War.

Mr. Trump, he said, “would then declare victory, say he got more than any other American president ever got, and the threat would still be there.”

Trump is being played with like he is some kind of little baby, easy to distract and happy to be given a lollipop.

Here's the rest of that excellent piece:

“We are in no rush,” Mr. Trump said of talks with the North at a news conference on Wednesday, after Republicans lost control of the House. “The sanctions are on. The missiles have stopped. The rockets have stopped. The hostages are home.”

His statement was true in just one sense. Mr. Trump appeared to be referring to the halt of missile flight tests, which have not occurred in nearly a year. But American intelligence officials say that the North’s production of nuclear material, of new nuclear weapons and of missiles that can be placed on mobile launchers and hidden in mountains at the secret bases has continued.

And the sanctions are collapsing, in part because North Korea has leveraged its new, softer-sounding relationship with Washington, and its stated commitment to eventual denuclearization, to resume trade with Russia and China.

Moreover, an American program to track those mobile missiles with a new generation of small, inexpensive satellites, disclosed by The New York Times more than a year ago, is stalled. The Pentagon once hoped to have the first satellites over North Korea by now, giving it early warning if the mobile missiles are rolled out of mountain tunnels and prepared for launch.

But because of a series of budget and bureaucratic disputes, the early warning system, begun by the Obama administration and handed off to the Trump administration, has yet to go into operation. Current and former officials, who said they could not publicly discuss the program because it is heavily classified, said there was still hope of launching the satellites, but they offered no timeline.

The secret ballistic missile bases were identified in a detailed study published Monday by the Beyond Parallel program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a major think tank in Washington.

The program, which focuses on the prospects of North-South integration, is led by Victor Cha, a prominent North Korea expert whom the Trump administration considered appointing as the ambassador to South Korea last year. His name was pulled back when he objected to the White House strategy for dealing with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader.

The existence of a series of ballistic missile bases contradicts President Trump’s assertion that his diplomacy with North Korea is leading to the elimination of its nuclear and missile program.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times
A State Department spokesman responded to the findings with a written statement suggesting that the government believed the sites must be dismantled: “President Trump has made clear that should Chairman Kim follow through on his commitments, including complete denuclearization and the elimination of ballistic missile programs, a much brighter future lies ahead for North Korea and its people.” A spokesman for the C.I.A. declined to comment.

On Tuesday, the office of President Moon Jae-in of South Korea dismissed the Center for Strategic and International Studies report as containing “nothing new,” saying that South Korea and United States intelligence authorities have known about the North Korean missile bases in greater detail with the help of military spy satellites.

Kim Eui-kyeom, Mr. Moon’s spokesman, also lashed out at the characterization of these North Korean missile activities as a “great deception.”

“North Korea has never promised to dismantle its missile bases, nor has it ever joined any treaty that obligates it to dismantle them. So calling this a ‘deception’ is not appropriate,” Mr. Kim said. “If anything, the existence of these missile bases highlights the need for negotiation and dialogue, including those between the North and the United States, to eliminate the North Korean threat.”

The revelation of the bases comes as Mr. Trump’s signature piece of diplomacy, based on his meeting exactly five months ago with Kim Jong-un, appears in peril. Publicly, Mr. Trump remains relentlessly optimistic, to the point that he said at a campaign rally that he and Mr. Kim, one of the world’s most brutal dictators, “fell in love.” But last week, talks with the North hit another snag, as it declared that it would not send its chief negotiator to meet with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in New York to plan the next summit meeting.

Since the initial meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim, on June 12 in Singapore, the North has yet to take the first step toward denuclearization: providing the United States with a list of its nuclear sites, weapons, production facilities and missile bases. North Korean officials have told Mr. Pompeo that would amount to giving him a “target list.”

American officials have responded that they already have a detailed target list — one that goes back decades — but want to use the North’s accounting to determine whether it is revealing all the known facilities and moving honestly toward denuclearization.

The new satellite imagery suggests the opposite.

“It’s not like these bases have been frozen,” Mr. Cha, the leader of the team that studied the images, said in an interview. “Work is continuing. What everybody is worried about is that Trump is going to accept a bad deal — they give us a single test site and dismantle a few other things, and in return they get a peace agreement” that formally ends the Korean War.

Mr. Trump, he said, “would then declare victory, say he got more than any other American president ever got, and the threat would still be there.”

The North Korea experts who have examined the images believe that the North’s motivations are fairly easy to interpret. “It looks like they’re trying to maximize their capabilities,” Joseph S. Bermudez Jr., a co-author of the report and a veteran analyst of satellite images of North Korea, said in an interview. “Any missile at these bases can take a nuclear warhead.”

“The level of effort that North Korea has invested in building these bases and dispersing them is impressive,” he added. “It’s very logical from a survival point of view.”

[_Doctor Steuss]

I just wanted to let everyone know that you can still get your NK/US Commemorative Coin. It is normally priced at $100. But, it is the "Deal of the Day" today, and has been reduced to $100.

[_subgenius]

OP - "the sky is falling".

[_Chap]

OP - "the sky is falling".

Nope.

It's more like Trump told us "It is going to rain strawberry sprinkle doughnuts because I kissed Kim Jong-un's rear end. We ain't gonna study war no more!", but now, strangely enough, it appears that the doughnuts and peace in the peninsula are, as lots of us said at the time, largely imaginary.

It's really no big surprise to you, surely?

[_canpakes]

OP - "the sky is falling".

Well, let’s not hope that it rains, anyway. Trump can’t go out in the rain.

[_subgenius]

OP - "the sky is falling".

Nope.

It's more like Trump told us "It is going to rain strawberry sprinkle doughnuts because I kissed Kim Jong-un's rear end. We ain't gonna study war no more!", but now, strangely enough, it appears that the doughnuts and peace in the peninsula are, as lots of us said at the time, largely imaginary.

It's really no big surprise to you, surely?

funny you use the ord "imaginary" because the OP is basically just guessing....the widespread occurrence of the word "could" merits the chicken little proclamation, and that is, as a courtesy, assuming an acorn actually hit you on the head.

[_Dr. Shades]

It is normally priced at $100. But, it is the "Deal of the Day" today, and has been reduced to $100.

So, a 0% discount?