{UAH} North Korea played Trump for a fool, just as we knew it would

By Paul Waldman

November 12, 2018 at 12:35 PM

North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and President Trump (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)

About six months ago, attendees at a Trump rally were so giddy about the president's masterly diplomatic maneuvering in supposedly convincing North Korea to suspend testing of nuclear weapons that they began to chant "Nobel! Nobel!," taking even President Trump by surprise (though he later claimed that "everyone thinks" he deserved one). Not long after, Trump met with Kim Jong Un and returned to declare that he had achieved what presidents had tried and failed to do for decades:

Well, about that …

North Korea is moving ahead with its ballistic missile program at 16 hidden bases that have been identified in new commercial satellite images, a network long known to American intelligence agencies but left undiscussed as President Trump claims to have neutralized the North's nuclear threat.

The satellite images suggest that the North has been engaged in a great deception: It has offered to dismantle a major launching site — a step it began, then halted — while continuing to make improvements at more than a dozen others that would bolster launches of conventional and nuclear warheads.

The existence of the ballistic missile bases, which North Korea has never acknowledged, contradicts Mr. Trump's assertion that his landmark diplomacy is leading to the elimination of a nuclear and missile program that the North had warned could devastate the United States.

Who could have predicted something like this would happen? Pretty much everyone. Except, apparently, the president of the United States. In fact, it's precisely Trump's naive view of foreign policy that brought us to this point.

Let's recall what happened at that summit in June, when the two leaders signed an agreement under which the North Koreans promised to "work toward" denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula. That pledge was almost completely meaningless; as Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told me at the time, "It's important to note that that is a weaker commitment to denuclearization than the regime has made in the past."

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*A positive mind is a courageous mind, without doubts and fears, using the experience and wisdom to give the best of him/herself.

 

 We must dare invent the future!
The only way of limiting the usurpation of power by
 individuals, the military or otherwise, is to put the people in charge  - Capt. Thomas. Sankara {RIP} '1949-1987

 *"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent

revolution inevitable"**…  *J.F Kennedy

 

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