Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/03/09/i-alone-can-fix-it.html
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Philosophical question: What happens when immovable crazy meets unstoppable stupid?
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Those two need a moderator.
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See? I told you ignorance is strength!
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Nixon’s going to legitimize Mao if he opens diplomatic relations with China.
Obama’s going to legitimize Castro if he meets and talks with him or loosens restrictions on Cuba.
At what point can we ever start to negotiate if we assume the other side never acts in good faith? The Doomsday Clock is at two minutes to midnight. They’ve been threatening each other for months. How can we hope to move away from that? Get them both to focus on porn star hush money scandals so they forget about making war?
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*finger kisses* Beautiful! Brava!
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Trump is no Kissinger.
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Kim Jong Un is neither crazy or stupid. His regime is confronting an enemy that has a long record of ‘regime changing’ by force of arms. But those regime changes have not occurred in states that possessed nuclear weapons.
Trump is mainly ignorant which may be a positive as he may not know or understand that the whole U.S./Nth Korea thing originates in a desire to contain the spread of an economic system with severely limited scope for profit-takers and rent-seekers. Such a policy (as is also the case with Cuba) although it would seem now to have been now long redundant, can persist without real questioning in bureaucracies like the State Department.
Trumps ignorance, and reluctance to be informed may be what is needed for a breakthrough. A relatively simple solution would be a peace treaty to end the ‘Korean War’ with the United States guaranteeing the sovereignty of both North and South Korea with decisions about unification by peaceful means being left to the people of the Korean peninsula.
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Trump. Trump happens.
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“Only Nixon could go to China.”—Ancient Vulcan Proverb
“Trump could go to North Korea, but that doesn’t mean it was a good idea. Dumbfuck was crazy.”—Slightly Newer Vulcan Proverb
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If that’s not a “lizard people” spaceship hiding in plain sight I don’t know what is.
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North Korea doesn’t even need to change up their playbook to reel in Trump. They’ll agree to “denuclearize” in exchange for luxury items (and rice to make their army happy). Trump will crow that he has personally–without any assistants or assistance whatsoever–cured humanity of the need to fight wars, claim that he’s returned from DPRK with peace for our time, etc.
Kim and his junta will smoke freshly-imported cigars, drink freshly-imported but well-aged whiskey (with an “E”, while it’s still tariff-free), then roll their heavily-shielded nuke cores by farm tractor somewhere up in the mountains where they themselves have trouble finding them–much less UN inspectors.
After a year or so of this docility, when the whiskey runs dry and the cigars ashes, and the army talks of empty bowls and looks toward Pyongyang, the rhetoric will slowly ratchet up again, culminating in the usual “death to the US,” some missile warfare with the Sea of Japan, and perhaps even a new (underground) nuke test.
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Why do I get this weird feeling that Kim is taking a page from the movie “The Interview” (the one with Seth Rogan, that got Sony revenge hacked), and plans on running through the plot of that movie in reverse?
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North Korea doesn’t need to get a single concession out of the US for this meeting to count as a major win for Kim’s government. Just getting Trump to the table is enough to send their intended message: that they are now a world power with enough nuclear capability to compel America to treat them as an equal.
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There’s been very good analysis of the issue in this topic already (Miki_Bitsko1, isomorphic). But assuming for a minute that North Korea were genuinely negotiating denuclearisation I think their terms would be that both sides commit to it, which of course USA would flatly refuse - which North Korea would use for their internal and external PR.
The only way for the world to come ahead in these talks is to add, somewhat counter intuitively, even more business incentives: foreign aid to North Korea will resume if they allow more foreign capital to enter the country. A cultural shift in North Korea will, in my opinion, be the most effective way to destabilise the regime.
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Was that intended as good or bad news? Kissinger has far more blood on his hands than Trump, although to be fair Kissinger has had a lot more time to collect it.
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Well, one of them is a megalomanic sociopath who owes his position in the world to his father, doesn’t care about his people other than using them as tools for being in power, and seems to be dedicated to isolate his country from the rest of the world, alienating his allies, all while styling himself a a genius supreme leader.
And the other one is Kim Jong-un.
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So the actual agenda is foreign ownership and installing a puppet goverment?
“Very good analysis” indeed.
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And food-eaters.
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