North Korea Talks: Here's What a Pragmatist Could Hope For
There are indeed reasons to be optimistic, but not because I see high odds of striking a workable deal with the North Korean totalitarian regime to abandon its nuclear ambitions. Instead, the best realistic scenarios would have the North Korean leaders deciding to carve out a more normal existence for their nation. Talks can help create or hasten that outcome.
By meeting with other foreign leaders, the North Korean regime would be forced to build up its basic processes for dealing with the rest of the world. That in turn creates interest groups and flows of information (some of which invariably leak out). The North Korean populace responds by thinking more about the outside world, making it harder to control by propaganda. In turn the North Korean leadership may decide to continue economic liberalization.
Another good sign is that Chinese President Xi Jinping has vowed to go to Pyongyang for further talks with Kim. And in addition to these explicitly political contacts, Kim visited China's technology hub Zhongguancun, where he was the recipient of much attention and he tried on virtual-reality headsets.....READ MORE
“It’s no secret that President Trump and President Macron enjoy a good working relationship. I may say a close personal relationship,” a senior administration official said in a briefing with reporters.
President Macron has already feted Trump in grand style, inviting him to be his guest of honor at France’s elaborate Bastille Day celebrations last summer. The president and first lady dined with Macron and his wife at the Eiffel Tower and sat side-by-side as French military tanks, planes and troops rolled down the Champs-Elysee in the elaborate military parade.
By extending an invitation to host Macron for a state visit in the United States, Trump is in many ways returning the favor and celebrating the deeply-rooted historical ties between the two countries and marking the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I. This will be the president and first lady’s first time hosting a foreign leader to the full ceremonial honors of a state visit and sends a symbolic message about the value Trump places on his close ties with the French president.
“This will be a visit of symbolism of the strength and history of the U.S.-French relationship,” says Heather A. Conley, senior vice president for the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It will be more symbolism than substance.”
By reducing the burden felt by isolationist American voters, the Abe initiative will have the effect of encouraging the sustainable involvement of the United States in the region. They will also act as a precautionary measure against the worst-case scenario of the United States withdrawing from the Asian region altogether.
Trump’s concept of a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific,” which he emphasized during his visit to Asia in November 2017, is understood as incorporating the Security Diamond concept previously put forward by Abe.
In this context, Japan’s provision of capacity building assistance for the nations of the Indo-Pacific region together with public goods under the banner of Proactive Contribution to Peace are critical issues in Japanese diplomacy, and are compatible with the U.S.-Japan alliance.
It’s not unlike the approach of
President George H.W. Bush, a one-time diplomat who constantly cultivated such
personal relations, which enabled him ultimately to construct the broad
international coalition that liberated Kuwait 26 years ago this week.
Trump has also dispatched the
secretaries of Defense and State around the world, establishing personal
connections with their counterparts. And this past weekend he sent Vice
President Mike Pence to Europe for more talks.
Though overshadowed by media
fixation on his loud news conference talk, Trump’s brand of personal diplomacy
may, in fact, be one of the quiet successes of this young administration. He’s
already met with the king of Jordan and the prime ministers of Britain, Japan,
Canada and Israel.
Ironically, the most unrelenting – and erroneous – criticism
comes from the supposed anti-interventionist Daniel Larison over at The
American Conservative, who, aside from echoing the easily refutable objections
raised by the “experts” he ceaselessly cites, flat out denies that the North
Koreans are at all interested in denuclearization:
Why would an alleged
anti-interventionist and opponent of unnecessary wars – particularly one who
had been accusing Trump of leading us down the path to war on the Korean
peninsula – turn up his nose at this effort? “Trump’s ‘phase two’ for North Korea means war,”
averred Larison on February 24: a week before that he actually wrote a piece
entitled “North Korea and the Trump Administration’s Disdain for
Diplomacy”! Now that that alleged disdain has mysteriously
disappeared, it’s been acquired by Larison, who claims that the goal of
denuclearization is unachievable. The Koreans, both North and South, are either
deluded or they’re trying to deceive us.
The sad truth is that Larison
is suffering from a very bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome to the point
that he’s blinded by his contempt for Trump as a person. This kind of
subjectivism is fatal for any pundit, particularly one who writes regularly about
foreign policy.
Looking back, there is a night-and-day difference between Donald Trump’s diplomatic style and Obama. Trump deals with adversary diplomats by counter-punching. He will only put up with so much, then he comes out swinging. Trump knows that talking “nice” and being hesitant doesn’t help. Obama never learned those lessons, and neither did his Secretary of State John Kerry. Even Middle East Muslims, fearful over Obama’s failures in the war against the Islamic State and a cash-rich emboldened Iran, publicly stated “No one will weep” over Obama’s departure.
Americans wanted a leader when they elected Obama. What they got was the leader of the Democratic Party, not of all Americans. What they got was a president who had never faced real life uncertainties, except perhaps some unusual family aspects in his childhood, but never real adversity or fierce resistance. When he got hit hard, Obama did not know how to get up from the canvas.
Trump came to fight, not as a polite gentleman but as a leader to restore greatness for all of America. That’s the difference between Trump diplomacy and Obama diplomacy.
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Will Trump and North
Korea's Kim Jong Un Make Peace? History Says No, Photos Say Maybe
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Trump’s style of diplomacy and his foreign policy agenda are a radical departure from his predecessor’s. In the Philippines, this shift is largely welcome. Sixty-nine percent of Filipinos surveyed by Pew Research Center in late September of this year had confidence that Trump would do the right thing in world affairs.
On his first official visit to the country, Trump praised his treatment in the Philippines as “red carpet like nobody, I think, has probably ever received.” In turn, he was officially declared “a friend of the Duterte administration.”
Ultimately, a positive change in the direction of U.S.-Philippines relations may come down to whether Trump and Duterte’s mutual admiration is enough to shift the Philippines’ foreign policy back toward the United States. Doing so will likely require avoiding discussion of human rights, leaving Filipinos to bear the costs.
But given the current environment with Iran, less is more. If Trump just avoids wriggling out of the nuclear deal and tones down the threatening rhetoric, he has the opportunity to be luckier than those who preceded him, possibly nudging Iran, and its patron Russia, towards a more constructive regional role. If, on the other hand, he lives up to his threats and unilaterally renounces the nuclear deal later this year, he will undermine this possibility, and possibly even give the hardliners in Tehran the cover story they need to crush Iranians pushing for positive change.
In a strange twist of fate, Trump, who derided the nuclear pact as the worst deal ever, potentially has more to gain from it than did Obama. First, for the same reasons Trump uses to disavow the deal, he could benefit from it. Trump claims that the deal is too narrow and doesn’t prevent Iran from pursuing its forward-leaning regional agenda.
But the good news seldom discussed publicly by the Trump administration is that the narrowness of the deal also plays to the advantage of the United States. Under the deal, the United States gains both a nuclear limited Iran and full flexibility to resist Iran’s regional agenda, should it choose to do so.
Artificial Intelligence Defines
the Political News Narrative
the Political News Narrative
Understanding the reasons why mainstream political accounts
express such a disconnect from facts, evidence and believability is compounded
by the techniques of programmed reporting often absent of human judgment and
ethics. The foremost propaganda rag for deceit, disinformation and
indoctrination, The Washington Post, is dedicated to mind control and does not
even attempt to mask their publication as objective journalism. Utopia for Jeff
Bezos, strives to perfect the synthetic technological revolution that inserts
AI as the future of mankind. Joe Keohane in WIRED presents What News-Writing Bots Mean for the Future of Journalism.
Small Business is the
Mainstay of the Economy
Business ventures are started for as many reasons as the
individuals who take the risk to build their own future. Whether they openly
acknowledge of not, making money is the key objective. Earning a profit keeps
the enterprise in business. On a microcosm level an independent operation
reflects the functions of the entire small business economy. Transnational
conglomerates move the physical presence of their operations as often as hot
money jumps the borders to gain a higher return on equity. Merchants invest in
their own neighborhoods, become the leaders of their communities and active
achievers in their own business endeavors.
Christian-Zionists Problem
- Khazar DNA
The recent breakdown in the
latest round of peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians is no
surprise. The Jerusalem Post reports in the article, Kerry hints: Israel to blame for deadlocked peace process,
“US Secretary of State John Kerry appeared to blame Israel on Tuesday for
dissolving a deal that would have extended negotiations with the Palestinians
for nine months”. Prospects for any lasting accommodation always fails because
Christian-Zionist incessantly supports a rogue ruling elite, who assert a
heretical claim of being “Chosen”, when their tribe stems from descendants,
other than Abraham. Until this apostate doctrine is debunked and discarded, no
peaceful political settlement is possible.
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