Yesterday, we looked at a piece of the psychological profile of Hitler that the OSS prepared for American policy makers and strategists during World War II. No doubt it will remind you of someone else more... contemporary: "His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; take advantage of every opportunity to raise a political whirlwind; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it." In terms of North Korea, Trump mentioned that if the whole "agreement" he claims he made with Kim Jong Un were to fall apart he would never publicly admit he was wrong.It looks like Trump is going to have to say something soon. North Korea isn't de-nuking. Yesterday, writing for the AP, Edith Lederer reported that "North Korea has not stopped its nuclear and missile programs and is violating U.N. sanctions including by 'a massive increase in illicit ship-to-ship transfers of petroleum products,' U.N. experts said in a new report... North Korea is also violating sanctions by transferring coal at sea and flouting an arms embargo and financial sanctions."
The panel of experts said North Korea attempted to sell small arms and light weapons and other military equipment via foreign intermediaries, including Syrian arms traffickers in the case of Houthi Shiite rebels in Yemen as well as Libya and Sudan. The report also said North Korea has continued military cooperation with Syria, in breach of U.N. sanctions....[T]he report said North Korea “has not stopped its nuclear and missiles programs” and continues to defy the sanctions resolutions.The experts said ship-to-ship transfers of petroleum products, oil and coal involve “increasingly sophisticated evasion techniques.”These include turning off Automatic Identification Systems, which are required to be on at all times under international regulations, physically disguising North Korean tankers, using small unregistered vessels, illegally changing names, carrying out night transfers and using additional vessels to trans-ship cargo, the report said.
As North Korea has always done when they break commitments, they blamed the U.S., in this case Mike Pompeo, who they claim is making "alarming" statements that are destabilizing the agreement Señor Trumpanzee made with Kim. North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho yesterday:
“We have initiated goodwill measures of, inter alia, a moratorium on nuclear tests and rocket launch tests and dismantling of nuclear test ground,” Ri said in a statement delivered to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) forum.“However, the United States, instead of responding to these measures, is raising its voice louder for maintaining the sanctions against the DPRK and showing the attitude to retreat even from declaring the end of the war, a very basic and primary step for providing peace on the Korean peninsula.”
