5-1-18
Trump needs to study up on North Korea's history of duplicity
Rounduptags: nuclear weapons, North Korea, Kim Jong Un, nuclear war, Trump
Before meeting with North Korea’s “very honorable” (Trump’s words) dictator, Kim Jong Un, the president should bone up on the history of that country’s duplicity and deception, including ways it has used the wishful thinking of some past U.S. presidents to achieve its objectives.
A good place to start is an essay written by Joshua Muravchik of the American Enterprise Institute for the March 2003 issue of Commentary magazine.
As Muravchik notes, North Korea’s nuclear program isn’t a recent development. It began in 1979 and since then, its leaders have played the West, and especially the U.S., like a Stradivarius.
In 1989, Pyongyang claimed it would agree that the entire Korean Peninsula become a nuclear-free zone (sound familiar?). Instead, after raising hopes in the George H.W. Bush administration, it began requiring conditions and incredibly won concession after concession, sending a message that the U.S. could be had.
In January 1992, North and South Korea reached an agreement to prohibit nuclear weapons from the peninsula, but North Korea refused to sign a “safeguards” agreement, and then said it would have to submit the deal to its legislature, a process that would deliberately take several months. More agreements, re-designations of nuclear plants into something they were not and more deception followed. ...
comments powered by Disqus
News
- What Happens When SCOTUS is This Unpopular?
- Eve Babitz's Archive Reveals the Person Behind the Persona
- Making a Uranium Ghost Town
- Choosing History—A Rejoinder to William Baude on The Use of History at SCOTUS
- Alexandria, VA Freedom House Museum Reopens, Making Key Site of Slave Trade a Center for Black History
- Primary Source: Winning World War 1 By Fighting Waste at the Grocery Counter
- The Presidential Records Act Explains How the FBI Knew What to Search For at Mar-a-Lago
- Theocracy Now! The Forgotten Influence of L. Brent Bozell on the Right
- Janice Longone, Chronicler of American Food Traditions
- Revisiting Lady Rochford and Her Alleged Betrayal of Anne Boleyn