- Edit 1Before modification by Cannoli at 14/06/2018 06:13:32 AM
I hope you don't mind that I really don't see much point in responding in kind, though.
The military exercises thing - agreed that there are valid arguments for stopping them, I'm not opposed to stopping them as such. And as I said, just because Trump announced this doesn't mean he can't announce the opposite tomorrow, this could be one of the cases where having a reputation for not living up to your word is actually beneficial. But supposing for a minute that he does stick to that announcement, the problem with that is A) he gives up even more leverage for free, and B) he didn't consult South Korea on it first. Neither of those things will matter in the long run if he somehow achieves lasting peace in Korea, that's true - but they don't appear to make that task any easier.
I still don't see how he's given anything away of substance. He's given them compliments & photo-ops. Now maybe this is a big deal in the conventional practices of diplomacy & official statements, but the same statesmen who would have refused to even meet with Kim would also not have made the same sort of comments about the summit with which the article took such exception in its opening paragraph.
I heard once during the campaign that Trump's followers took him seriously but not literally and his critics, and the media took him literally, but not seriously. No one expected him to prosecute every Mexican for rape or throw Clinton in prison, what they liked was that he saw things the same way. That too many Mexicans are criminally inclined and that Crooked Hillary deserves to be in prison. It's liberals get all nitpicky about that stuff and prosecute people for Nazism when they film dog tricks and fire people for thought crime and aberrant expressions. What's the conservative equivalent of suing wedding cake bakers and pizzerias? They fire teachers from private schools for going explicitly against the curriculum, whereas liberals fire public school teachers for off-campus political activity.
Trump ran against political correctness and thought-policing, and he's not going to parse his words the way liberals demand of conservative or Republican politicians and public figures, with major policy shifts being deliberately signaled by minute turns of phrase. As should be fairly obvious as of the last three years.
With that in mind, the stuff he "gave" North Korea & Kim, is negligible, and nothing the US is going to suffer for missing. The concessions he suggests are beneficial to the US as well, as it frees up military resources and brings the troops home. He's not proposing to throw good money after bad.
Regarding the dangers of sticking with his announcement, A) he can always go right back to insulting and publicly mocking Kim (you can look at the history of his commentary on the man as evidence of his negotiating ability - by leading off with the Rocket Man insult, he got Kim to a place where he was as happy as the article suggests by getting a friendly meeting and genial compliments) and B) who on Earth cares about South Korea's opinion? If they need US troops & military aid, they can bend over and take it. This is not a mutual threat we are facing together, where we need to be terrified of our allies backing out and seeking a separate peace. If South Korea wants to have a foreign policy opinion, they can call the White House and politely ask what it should be. This is not the days of Mahan where we need bases around the world to project power. We have a nuclear powered navy bigger than any two others. If we need to project power somewhere (and we don't), we can go and do it without needing a friendly country in which to land planes. And there has been no president with more credibility to follow through with such a policy than Trump.