He certainly employed his own unique brand of political boldness and gamesmanship with North Korea. It's probably not a good overall foreign policy strategy, but I'm not denying it could have worked in this case, and there is an argument to be that made that it was right to try a different approach with NK.

This is pure speculation, but another reason North Korea might have agreed to meet with the US is that maybe they figured it was politically advantageous to meet with Trump. I'm hoping he closely listened to his foreign policy and national security advisors before the meeting. If we give up a military presence on the Korean Penisula for a dishonest/flaky agreement to denuclearize, the summit will turn out to be a net-negative.

Maybe North Korea figures that they won't actually have to follow-up on any agreements AND receive some global legitimacy by the photo-op with the US President.

Lastly, I'll just reemphasize that I can't draw any strong conclusions from the summit at this point. The joint statement was vague and unspecific.

I haven't read any news today i wonder what was accomplished in that meeting...not speculation but accompished....I know so far the drills have stopped...

I wonder if the subject of Otto Warmbier came up.

Denuclearization through diplomacy is the goal, so I doubt it.


“Kim, Kim, I’m sure you have an phenomenal memory, much like myself. Did you think I would forget Otto ?
Wrong. I forget nothing

What the fuck was that ?”

I agree entirely with this post and find the bold with the slight change of "don't plan to follow-up on any agreements" to be the most likely.

they've done this exact song and dance for nearly 20 years. promise to stop the nukes, get cash, continue nukes, etc. but times and circumstances have changes substantially in the world.

absolutely, trump has to remain extremely cautious. but then again, the north koreans (in all likelihood) got their nukes. adding further nukes has relatively limited strategical use. so I see a higher chance for them to be serious and not pursue delaying tactics this time around.

but yeah, in spite of this sliver of hope, I still believe the modal outcome is that the north koreans never had any intentions of following-up on any denuclearization agreements.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jun 12 2018 02:21pm

to my eye they didn't really need to develop nukes once they demonstrated one on the same level as BigBoy. I agree with the opinion some experts hold that they are so utterly behind in intercontinental missile development that they only continued to test nukes as a diversion from how far they truly were from a delivery system that's reliable. essentially that they have a working nuke, and have for some time, but are incapable of sending it even to Seoul without it being intercepted with coldwar era tech.

Yep. It's straight out of the Kim regime playbook.

But if Trump actually gets North Korea to begin denuclearization, no matter how unlikely that is, I'll be the first to admit that it would be the biggest US foreign policy achievement in more than 50 years. But it's way too soon to say.

If specifics were discussed, I really hope we got something out of this meeting. If not, legitimizing Kim and the North Korean flag could do a lot of damage, and this could end up being a huge foreign policy blunder.

Personally I'm more worried about Russia annexing Crimea.

This post was edited by Scaly on Jun 12 2018 02:31pm

Well, in your end of the world I think I would be as well.

You really love the taste of my nuts huh?





Serious question - do you think we should position our troops to counter a possible attempt by the Romans to invade Gaul?

This post was edited by Scaly on Jun 12 2018 03:00pm