Reality doesn’t conform to the theory of the rational, calculating despot who can play the long game.
The summit was a significant step forward in avoiding war and achieving peace on the Korean peninsula. The summit gives an imprimatur to inter-Korean efforts to advance slow-motion reunification.
The war hawks are wrong when they say that past negotiations, like the 1994 Agreed Framework, didn’t make a difference. August 2017 was a reminder of the scariest, and riskiest, days of the Cold War. All month long, Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un engaged in a bitter war of words that escalated into tit-for-tat displays of military might and ended with mutual threats of mass destruction.
The historic resumption of diplomatic relations with Cuba could be (and should be) a precedent for a new approach to North Korea - a country three times larger than Cuba, perhaps more strategically sensitive than the latter and involving a nuclear potential that demands serious diplomacy.
Second guided-missile destroyer to join the USS John McCain; annual joint US-South Korean maneuvers that have so far included, fly-overs by B-52 bombers and mock bombing runs close to the North's border by two B-2 Stealth bombers that flew directly from the US. The exercises, appear to have provoked the latest escalation in tensions, already at near-record highs after the UN Security Council imposed new economic and diplomatic sanctions against Pyongyang last month.
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