Louder, and better, voices of the chattering class are pronouncing the Singapore Summit a...
Trump’s Singapore Summit Was a Bust—for the U.S.
(Daily Beast)
That...
Kim had a great summit. And he didn't even need to give anything away
(CNN)
That...
The Singapore Summit was a Victory for Kim Jong Un
(Washington Post)
And like that.
Now, if you actually read those better judgments, as this squeaky, lesser voice has you will read that Trump still should have gone. And that annoys this lesser voice to a great degree.
Trump gave Kim attention, respect, trust (none of which he should have given) and made concessions he should not have made without getting a "complete, verifiable, denuclearization" agreement out of Kim.
To all of which I ask one question and make more comments. The question:
"Are you better off today than you were 5, 25 or 65 years ago?"
The answer is yes. Closer to peace, further from war.
The comments:
Kim Jong Un gave up more. He committed to complete denuclearization and destroyed his nuclear facility in Pyongan before the summit. He re-committed to complete denuclearization in Singapore. Thereby he courted greater risk, existential risk, than did Trump from his own loud class for having forsaken his family regime's "sacred shield" to which they had been committed for more than a decade. In return Kim got a committment that Trump wouldn't pose an existential threat.
The stasis had to be broken. The Koreas, Japan, China, and under Kim, the U.S. has lived with the Korean Armistice for 65 years, still at war, not shooting (much) at each other, threatening to! but "eesing" (hostile staring) each other across the DMZ, keeping 35,000 U.S. troops in the South with a "committment" to America, to the South and to Japan and to China that it would sacrifice those 35,000, hundreds of thousands of South Koreans, ditto Japanese, as many Chinese as wish to be like sacrificed, and L.A. and perhaps points further east, in "defense" against a nuclear attack from the North.
That is a stasis that had to be broken.
Trump and Kim "trust" one another. Naive! Bad! Ridic...! Stop. Trump and Kim trusted each other before the summit--when each was threatening the other with nuclear "fire," hurling personal insults, bragging about the size of their nuclear "buttons;" they trusted that each would "totally destroy" (or attempt to destroy) the other. The threat of each side's fist had to be trusted as real by the other as a condition precedent to the trust in today's handshake.
I conclude with a question:
Would the open hands of today's handshake have been trusted if not unfolded first from fists? No.
