White House: Never Mind the North Korea Meeting, Trump Was Just Babbling

Editor’s note: Fact is the Korean crisis is easily solved. (And would have been even easier before NK built the bomb.) All it would take is for Washington to sit down with Pyongyang and take the amazing offer North Korea has been making all along: security guarantees and normalization of relations for North Korea in return for a measure of concessions on its nuclear weapons.

Normalization is good for Americans as it is, and to get nuclear arms control that only applies to the other side on top is an amazing deal that Washington would snap up in a heartbeat if it actually represented the interests of the American people.

Trouble is normalization would destroy the rationale for heavy Pentagon presence in East Asia, decrease the leverage Washington has over Tokyo and Seoul, and take the wind out of the  missile shield bonanza for the military-industrial complex.

So the Washington strategy has always been to make sure no sit down ever takes place — by demanding Pyongyang capitulates on the whole front before Americans even deign to talk to it.

Thus Trump’s announcement that he may be willing to sit down with Kim was truly revolutionary  — but unfortunately the deep state is already walking it back. Right now it doesn’t look like Washington will allow Trump to talk to North Koreans.

Donald Trump snared headlines across the world by announcing yesterday he would meet with North Korea, breaking with years of American policy that held such a meeting could only happen if North Korea made concessions on its nuclear program first. It turns out Trump’s foreign policy masterstroke did not come as the result of a Metternichtian calculation but instead a completely spontaneous outburst.

South Korean official Chung Eui-yong was in the White House yesterday meeting with other officials. Trump decided to see Chung right away; maybe Fox News was in repeats or something. Trump “then asked Mr. Chung to tell him about his meeting with Mr. Kim,” reports the New York Times. “When Mr. Chung said that the North Korean leader had expressed a desire to meet Mr. Trump, the president immediately said he would do it, and directed Mr. Chung to announce it to the White House press corps.”

It sounds from this account that Trump had no real idea that North Korea has always wanted a face-to-face meeting with the U.S. president, and the U.S. has always imposed conditions.

That would certainly be the logical interpretation of this account, given that, in the last week, Trump has confused North Korea with the other, extremely different South Korea, and demanded a laughably tiny $1 billion trade concession from China when he was supposed to demand $100 billion.

It certainly appears Trump believed, in the moment, that North Korea had not been interested in a meeting until then, so he needed to take the deal before they changed their mind. Whatever. Art of the Deal.

So then the administration rushed out its breakthrough announcement. But now the administration has to slowly back away without quite acknowledging it is doing so. Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters today Trump won’t meet with North Korea unless they offer concrete concessions beforehand:

Press Sec. Sanders on talks with North Korea: "The president will not have the meeting without seeing concrete steps and concrete actions take place by North Korea." https://t.co/phiWfrQOEU pic.twitter.com/7xHdQse21v

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) March 9, 2018

Of course, that’s the old policy. Which means Trump shot off his mouth and got excited and then his advisers had to explain to him why he can’t do that. Or maybe they haven’t explained it to him and are backing out without his permission. Whatever the explanation, the major policy change Trump announced appears to be completely moot because he plays the president on television but isn’t really president.

Source: New York Magazine