Fox News reported that an American research group claimed that North Korea began dismantling its main missile engine test facilities.
This is viewed as a possible sign that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is following through with the North Korean side of the agreement that Chairman Kim and President Trump agreed to at their historic summit in Singapore on 12 June.
The Fox piece continues:
Changing the intentions the U.S. and North Korea have towards each other in the long run is more important than possession of nuclear weapons themselves, argues Graham Fuller. By Graham E. Fuller The fascinating, elaborately choreographed diplomatic pas de deux in Singapore between Donald…Read more →
This week Chuck Ochelli joins me to discuss geopolitics and the problems of the world. We start off discussing the recent Singapore Summit between North Korea and the US. Chuck and I both offer our opinions and analysis of the “deal” that is being hammered out by Trump. We talk about the realities of what is actually being presented, and discuss the larger context of what this may mean for the Korean Peninsula.
While Donald Trump was off in Singapore trying to avert a third world war, his Treasury secretary was busy at home, trying to start one.
Steven Mnuchin used the U.S. president’s absence from Washington for a historic peace summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, as an opportunity to jack up sanctions against the Russian Federation.
During the Singapore summit, President Trump showed North Korean Chairman Kim Jong-un a video as a proposal for what might be in North Korea’s future with the improved relations between the US and the North Koreans, and the effects this might have on not only the North but everywhere.
The president also repeatedly made points about how there comes a stage in negotiations where one cannot go back. This video was designed with this point in mind, and one can see its expression quite clearly.
Here is the video the US delegation showed Kim Jong-un:
When President Reagan met with Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland, on October 11, 1987, it helped put into motion events that would dramatically change the global system. A line of communication was fully opened with an enemy of decades and substantive issues were on the table. Though the summit was initially reported as a failure, with the two sides unable to sign a final agreement, history now shows us that it was actually a great success that paved the way to the eventual end of the Cold War and a reduction in the threat of a nuclear war.
The episode of the ‘on/off’ Kim-Trump summit provides a further stark example of the fact that Donald Trump, 16 months into his Presidency, remains an amateur.
The first thing to say is that Donald Trump may have made the right call when he tried to call the Singapore summit with Kim Jong-un scheduled for 12th June 2018 off. If he now goes ahead with the summit – for which he is visibly unprepared – he is taking on serious risks.
