Running North Korea freakout thread

The two sides are talking. Good.

The complaint about the summit. No details. Criticism.

This meeting, they start getting into the details. Come on, what do people expect? One two-day meeting, all nice and tidy, all details agreed to, wrapped with a bow on top?

In all likelihood, one side might bring up something unexpected and not thought through by the other. Or both sides might bring some detail up. That sounds like exactly what happened.

If I were Trump, I’d slow walk this thing incrementally, delivering progress late this year to help the 2018 midterms, then making more progress through 2019 with a complete accord in early 2020 to really help the re-election.

NK should play it that way too - they should want Trump for 6.5 more years, not 2.5 years. Talk about influencing an election. NK delivers in early 2020. They should see that as the potential huge win-win while working details and incremental progress in between.

Rome wasn’t built in a day. Reinventing early 20th Century NK into 21st Century NK is going to take a bit more than a few meetings.

Overall, these talks, from a different framework than ever before, are a GOOD thing.

The 1968 talks (JAN-DEC) over the return of the crew of the USS Pueblo took eleven months, and most of the delay was acceptable wording of an apology and a signed receipt for the prisoner transfer. Eleven!

 

You take a far rosier view of talks with NK than I do. Trump is as eager as a dog with a tennis ball, and about as easy to trick with a pump fake.

 

I’m trying to think of this from all sides (including NK) and as objectively as possible.

That AP article and those two who wrote it: we often talk about framing narratives here. And in a thread elsewhere this past week or so, I think typefitter and DD weighed in on the use of first person in stories. It was an interesting discussion and why I like SJ. One of them said something to the effect of: even without the use of first person, an author is writing from their observations and could subtly slip in some bias (that’s the way I took it, or the way I thought as I read the discussion). Interestingly, tf said that use of “first person” is at least more honest, although he still doesn’t care much for first person usage.

I bring this up here, because I took the AP article to be on the whole, rather negative about the whole two-day visit. NK saying “regrettable” framed the whole article. I bet more good came out of that meeting than bad. Both sides are learning how far they have to go.

And let’s think back to Jimmy Carter. It took a couple of years to get the Camp David Accords signed. HE deserved a Nobel for that.

These things take time. It’s not like creating instant pudding or popping something into a microwave.

Two things:
people need more patience and perspective, and people, including reporters, need greater knowledge of history.

I want both sides to work all of this through and be completely happy with what they are agreeing to, because then they have a greater chance of abiding by it.

 

I won't find it now but I ran across a tweet talking about trump giving them a copy of Rocket Man. The tweeter said they sent back a copy of American Idiot.

 

"These things take time. It’s not like creating instant pudding or popping something into a microwave.

Two things: people need more patience and perspective, and people, including reporters, need greater knowledge of history."


In large part this is why I'm very negative about this particular set of talks. The Trump/NK summit, from the announcement of the possibility until Trump returned home, took less time than it normally takes to agree to come to the table, let alone to set up the parameters and do the preliminary talks to set the agenda. Trump was headlong eager for these talks, his head was turned by his supporters talking about a Nobel Prize, and instead of taking a reserved approach he telegraphed that he could be had. He did the diplomatic equivalent of sitting down at the poker table and announcing that he had never played in a casino before.

There was next to no State Department expertise involved, no one with experience negotiating with the Norks, no institutional memory. They'd all been fired, quit, or been run off. Few on the U. S. side of the table had any sense of the history of these ongoing talks.

NK on the other hand had many people who had been involved in these talks for years, in some cases decades. They knew the history of our positions better than we did. They saw Trump coming and fleeced him like a kid at the county fair.

That's what they do. They hold out the possibility of making an agreement which is good for both sides, then they slow walk whatever they agreed to, and generally over time don't do it at all while in the meantime getting the concessions from us that we agreed to. I see no sign that the NK's are going to do a damned thing to weaken their nuclear program, and they got a priceless PR victory in addition to our agreeing to discontinue military exercises with SK.

What, exactly, did the U.S. gain other than a vaguely worded statement?

 

The Elton John CD is true.

 

NC, all fair points to be sure.

But they are talking. And of course, the devil is in the details.

For the moment, we no longer live in the status quo at all. Something substantial might be achieved.

To your point though: it’s got to be a bit strange dealing with the US when our President can change every four years. If they denuclearize, and someone different comes in and reverses everything 2.5 or 6.5 years from now, they’d feel fucked.

But, they seem to sense that there is an opportunity here, beyond what was the status quo. It is going to be largely on them to change from their past.

The two things that I get stuck on are:

1) how does a dictatorship radically change and yet stay in power? Particularly if reunification happens.

2) how does the NK economy move into the 21st Century and become more dependent on the West?

Thomas Friedman wrote that there was a principle that no two countries who each have a McDonalds has ever gone to war with one another, which held true until Bosnia.

If NK could be opened up and pried away from China, and NK actually participate in the global economy, that would go quite a ways toward long term stability in the region.

I’ve got to stop and do some chores, else I am going to be severely in the gf doghouse later today.

Good discussion NC. Hope the thread stays open and on topic of NK.

 

Having a trade war while trying to deal with NK is probably not a great strategy.

 

I heard Rocket Man is turning out to be false, but the Idiot part was a joke. (although, of course, he is an idiot)

The tweet would have played out better than my attempt at recreating it!

 

I completely agree it takes time to nail these things down. And maybe it will all work out. I don't think any citizen of a Western country knows for sure because I don't think anyone in the West really knows how Kim thinks.

But the North Koreans are savvy enough to understand that using language such as "regrettable" sends a message. And I think AP has to go with that.

 

What did they lose, other than a promise to not hold joint military exercises, which they hold one time a year in the early spring and could resume at any point?

Both nations made promises. Both nations are batting about .035 at keeping theirs.