The forthcoming world-shaking Kim Jong Un-Donald Trump tete-a-tete is reportedly slated for some time in May, with its time and venue yet to be determined. So far, North Korea is yet to officially confirm the reported summit.
What made Donald Trump so psyched and accept on the spot the verbal invite from North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Un to the historic first summit meeting between the two nuclear enemies?
Here are six major takeaways from the North Korean-American summit on the assumption that it will actually take place.
First. The summit amounts to Kim Jong Un’s historic bloodless upset victory over US.
Second. Trump would be virtually hoisting the white flag yet is impressed at Kim Jong Un’s brilliant statesmanship after a futile year of “fire and fury” threats.
Third. The summit is a full-fledged summit being held on an equal footing between two nuclear foes.
Fourth. The summit would eventually lead to the US decision to end the American military presence in South Korea and Japan and lift all the sanctions imposed on North Korea.
Fifth. The summit would enable Kim Jong Un to initiate the long-elusive process to preside over the reunification under the umbrella of a bi-system confederation.
Sixth. Kim Jong Un is the 21st century Kwanggaedo the Great, great tamer of the US, architect of Korean reunification and most jealous guardian of world peace and security.
Look at details:
First. The summit would amount to Kim Jong Un’s historic bloodless upset victory over US.
If history is anything to go by, the face-to-face meeting of the North Korean supreme leader and the American president would most likely go down as the greatest classic upset victory ever recorded in history.
Far before the historic North Korean-American summit takes place, Kim Jong Un has already scored a symbolic bloodless victory by getting Trump to agree to meet with him without delay in a telltale fashion without umpteen months or years of advance consultations at lower levels.
Trump’s snap decision to meet with Kim Jong Un itself is an unprecedented major concession to the supreme leader of the country he has imposed the harshest sanctions over its nuclear weapons program. It indicates that Trump is at long last coming to terms with the reality of life that North Korea is a nuclear weapons state with a full ICBM capability to reach anywhere in the Lower Forty-Eight.
It also shows for all the world to see clearly that ending the antediluvian US policy of hostility to North Korea is long overdue.
The table is now set in such a way that whatever its outcome is a victory for Kim Jong Un. Depending on his behavior, Trump could end up.being played like a gold-plated violin or taking refuge in fantasy to escape a tragic reality he can’t accept.
Indisputably obvious is this fact: Should he have cold feet at the last moment, bowing to fears at home and abroad about the risks of meeting with Kim Jong Un, Trump might bail out of the summit or stand the North Korean leader up or walk out of it angrily, the American President would come off as chicken, gutless bastard to face up to Kim Jom Jong Un, a wise head on young shoulders who has been much longer around the block.
However, as a self-styled great dealmaker Trump should know better than to walk out of the summit and stumble into a war nobody wants, playing into the hands of the canny fox. A war with North Korea would reduce the Continental USA to an uninhabitable radioactive contaminated continent.
Kim Jong Un would respond to the unlikely event by saying, “Go ahead! Make my day!” All he has to do is to push the nuclear button and all the thermonuclear-topped ICBMs and SLBMs will be zeroing on the preset strategic targets:
In less than ten minutes Tokyo and American bases in Japan would be consumed in a nuclear attack, less than thirty minutes Guam and Hawaii sent down to Davy Jones’s locker and in less than an hour New York, Washington, DC, and other key cities burnt down in a nuclear conflagration.
Second. Trump would be virtually hoisting the white flag yet is impressed at Kim Jong Un’s brilliant statesmanship after a futile year of “fire and fury” threats.
To paraphrase the remarks of CIA director Pompeo, never before have the North Koreans had the Americans in a position where the US homeland is at such risk and where the US leadership is under such pressure that they have no choice but to begin conversations on terms dictated by Kim Jong Un.
This would be tantamount to hoisting the white flag, a dramatic reversal of the longstanding American policy, which accounts for the shock of Americans and the world alike North Korea’s achievement of full nuclear weapons capability is the greatest immediate threat to the United States, too scary for Trump and his advisers to bear to imagine themselves and other Americans in Washington having the sword of Damocles above their heads and being obliterated in a fiery nuclear inferno in a thermonuclear strike like a bolt out of the blue.
In his 2018 New Year address Kim Jong Un declared that the Americans cannot launch a nuclear war against North Korea.
“In no way would the United States dare to ignite a war against me and our country.
“The whole of its mainland is within the range of our nuclear strike and the nuclear button is on my office desk all the time; the United States needs to be clearly aware that this is not merely a threat but a reality.”
CNN broadcasted December 3, 2017:
“(CNN) White House national security adviser HR McMaster said Saturday that North Korea represents “the greatest immediate threat to the United States” and that the potential for war with the communist nation is growing each day.”
The specter of nuclear war with North Korea the US may just wade into by accident or design has scared the daylights out of the American population of 326 million.
CBS reported August 8, 2017 on a poll just taken before North Korea’s striking technological prowess, showing Trump has Americans frightened about North Korea,:
“Nearly three-quarters of Americans [72 percent] are uneasy about the possibility of conflict with North Korea.”
January 13, 2017BBC aired a report, “’The whole state was terrified’: How Hawaii reacted to false alert.”
“Matt Lopresti, a member of the Hawaiian House of Representatives, told local television outlet KGMB he and his family had sought shelter in a bathtub.
“’We got our children, grabbed our emergency supplies, put them in our most enclosed room in our house which is our bathroom… We put them in the bathtub, said our prayers, tried to find out what the hell was going on because we didnt hear any alarms, any of the sirens…’”
●Trump agreed to meet Kim Jong Il for the first summit, ominously a mere three months after North Korea successfully test-fired a multi-warheaded Hwasong-15 ICBM capable of reaching anywhere in the Lower Forty-Eight.
A Hwasong-15 ICBM is capable of delivering variable-yield thermonuclear warheads to several key cities on the Continental USA such as New York, Washington, DC, Chicago, San Francisco, Houston and Miami.
●Trump’s on-the-spot acceptance of the North Korean leader’s verbal invite was timed to coincide with the expiration of what CIA director Mike Pompeo, BBC reported October 20, 2017, described as the grace period of North Korea being a handful months away from completing a fully-functional ICBMs capable of hitting the US with nuclear weapons. The false remark allowed Trump to be in denial and play for time for possible negotiations with North Korea.
●The verbal invitation came via South Korea but was not hand carried by any North Korean officials. No official confirmation of the invitation by North Korea has come, either.
● Still, Trump was so psyched that he initially proposed holding the summit with the North Korean supreme leader in April. It seems that Trump can’t wait to see him.
● Trump’s on the spot agreement to meet with Kim Jong Un knocked down with a feather both the South Korean visitors and a phalanx of American officials who were gathered in the Oval Office as well as allies, diplomats and experts in Asia and the rest of the world.
● During a less than an hour meeting with South Koreans,Trump threw aside caution and dispensed with decades of convention, allowing a South Korean official to announce an American president’s decision to meet with Kim Jong Un at the White House.
●The Trump Administration have not set any preconditions to holding the planned summit.
●For Donald Trump impressed by the seasoned statesmanship of the mystery-shrouded North Korean supreme leader, the holy grail is having the privilege of becoming the first American President ever to meet with the heaven-sent great man of Mt. Paekdu, a tough act to follow.
The New York Times observed March 10, 2018:
“To his advisers, Mr. Trump has said he is impressed that Mr. Kim at such a young age has outmaneuvered almost everyone.”
In his March 14, 2018 remarks before at a fundraiser in Missouri Trump portrayed the coming meeting with Kim Jong Un as “the biggest thing that’s happened in 40 years” and “somewhat of a miracle.”
In his May 1, 2017 interview with Bloomberg Trump went out of his way to state: “If it would be appropriate for me to meet with him, I would absolutely, I would be honored to do it.”.
Appearing on CBS Face the Nation April 30, 2017, Trump went as far as to describe his North Korean counterpart as “a pretty smart cookie.”
AP reported March 2, 2017:
“So it’s little wonder that South Koreans are bewildered by President Donald Trump’s use of the term ‘smart cookie’ to refer to current leader Kim Jong Un, and by Trump’s assertion that he’d be ‘honored’ by a possible meeting.”
Third. The summit is a full-fledged summit being held on an equal footing between two nuclear foes.
The summit meeting is between the top leaders of the sole surviving superpower on one hand and the fourth most powerful nuclear power capable of zapping the USA back to the stone age, just after Russia and China, on the other.
What sets the North Koreans apart from the Russians and the Chinese is their sense of superiority to the Americans, who are possessed with their traumatic once-bitten-twice-shy sense of inferiority attributable to their humiliating defeatat the hands of Kim Il Sung in the Korean War, the wrong war, at the wrong time and with the wrong enemy.
Gen. Mark Clark recalled, “In carrying out the instructions of my government, I gained the unenviable distinction of being the first United States Army commander in history to sign an armistice without victory.”
The American inferiority (Goliath) complex goes a long way toward explaining the uncharacteristic absence of any American military reprisal against North Koreafor a series of incidents, despite American outburst. Which former CIA analyst Jennifer Lind analyzed in her April 12, 2012 Foreign Affairs article, “Why North Korea Gets Away with It: Pyongyang’s Skillful Deterrence.”
Among them are the 1968 capture of spy ship USS Pueblo, the 1969 downing of intelligence-gathering EC-121, the 1976 ax murder of US officers over a poplar tree, the 1993-94 nuclear crisis, and North Korea’s reiterated public threats to turn New York and Washington, DC into a towering nuclear inferno on Trump’s watch.
In another revealing move, the US conspicuously failed to retaliate against North Korea twice in 2010 when South Korea, a treaty ally, came under attack.
In March of the year, a South Korean warship Cheonan was sunk in South Korean waters, killing 46 seamen, in the presence of American naval assets, allegedly hit by a torpedo fired from a ghost North Korean submarine
In November North Korea shelled he South Korean Island of Yeonpyeon, killing four South Koreans.
Fourth. The summit would eventually lead to the US decision to end the American military presence in South Korea and Japan and lift all the sanctions imposed on North Korea.
One of the most important implications of Kim Jong Un’s buildup of North Korea into one of the few thermonuclear-tipped ICBM powers is its decoupling effect of weaning the American allies in the Far East from the US, leaving them distrustful of each other: the erosion of American credibility in Northeast Asia and the collapse of the American alliance South Korea and Japan
For the US allies, the American guarantee to defend them in a contingency is in greater doubt, as they are well aware that it is characteristic of the US to throw friends under the bus, when the American national interests are at stake.
It does not pay for South Korea and Japan to base American troops on their soil when the two countries are within range of North Korea’s shorter-range nuclear missiles. Should they be prepared to put Seoul and Tokyo in harm’s way in order to save New York?
Likewise, would the Americans really be prepared to risk New York or Los Angeles to save Seoul or Tokyo?
A successful bloody-nose strike on North Korea would self-evidently leave Tokyo and Seoul or other cities reduced to smoldering ruins with millions of casualties in a retaliatory North Korean nuclear missile strike. Should South Korea and Japan be expected to be grateful to the outcome?
In his above-mention March 14, 2018 remarks before at a fundraiser in Missouri, Trump clearly threatened to withdraw US troops from South Korea over trade and warned Japan against exploiting the US market.
By all indications, the Kim-Trump summit and following bilateral negotiations would most likely produce the most unthinkable results: lifting all the sanctions on North Korea, ending the American military presence in South Korea and Japan and dismantling the American-South Korean alliance and the American alliance with Japan.
A case in point is the comingNorth Korean-American summit, long been considered unthinkable, is less than two month away to the astonishment of most pundits and US allies.
The tragic irony is the fact that the North Korean nuclear crisis is an entirely American self-inflicted injury. The US policy of hostility has been the chief enabler of the nuclear crisis. The repeated US nuclear threats and sanctions forced North Korea to launch crash program to develop an ICBM force capable of nuking the US.
The most stringent sanctions ever imposed on North Korea should have brought it to its knees. As it has turned out, however, they have provided the North Koreans with the most needed bread of adversity, becoming a main engine behind their full nuclear weapons capability and impressive economic recovery.
The New York Times wrote April 30, 2017:
“Even as President Trump bets on tougher sanctions, especially by China, to stop the North from developing nuclear-tipped missiles capable of striking the United States, the country’s improving economic health has made it easier for it to withstand such pressure and to acquire funds for its nuclear program.”
North Korea’s economic gain was acknowledged by Dr, John Merrill, a former State Department intelligence analyst and a scholar at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).
If the Americans are 100% right in calling the presence of ICBMs on Korean soil the existential threat to the US, the North Koreans are 200% right in perceiving the American presence in South Korea, Japan and the nuclear assets on Guam, Hawaii and on the US homeland as the same threat to their country.
If the US is to remove what it perceives the existential threat to its security, the US must logically move to eliminate what North Korea sees as the existential threat to its safety. Only when the Americans have removed for good what the North Koreans see as their greatest threat to their existence, Kim Jong Un has good reason to respond in kind on the principle of action for action.
Kim Jong Un would never settle for whatever written security guarantee or establishment of diplomatic relations without any creditable concrete steps such as removal of the US military forces from South Korea and Japan. North Korea has learned a severe lesson the hard way from Iraq and Libya
For an ideal deal to be hammered out, the American military presence in the Far East must be terminated and the nuclear weapons capability on US soil must be disbanded in a complete, verifiable and irretrievable way.
However, a mutually acceptable compromise would call for immediate removal of threats to the security of North Korea: repeal of all the sanctions imposed on north Korea, American military disengagement from the Far East and a peace treaty stipulating for officially ending the state of war between the two nuclear enemies and a mutual missile detargeting agreement, allowing both North Korea and the US to retain their respective nuclear forces on their own soil.
In other words, Trump must choose between two options: One is to keep the US troops in South Korea and Japan at the expense of American cities and the other to keep American cities safe by ending the American military presence.
A mutual missile detargeting agreement would remove the immediate existential threat to the Lower Forty-Eight.
Japan and South Korea could decide to go nuclear, should they be ready and willing to be left out in the cold, bearing the full brunt of the harshest sanctions, criminalization and isolation that North Korea has gone through.
In making the defining decision of ending the military presence in the Far East, America-first Trump may as well stress that at stake is the US’s supreme national interests, that is, the security of the US homeland. He may go on to cite two landmark precedents which saw the US withdrawing its troops and missiles from foreign soil.
One is the 1972 Nixon trip to China which came five years after the 1967 Chinese explosion of a hydrogen bomb. The Nixon visit produced the Shanghai Communique, reversing the US policy of China containment and pledging the phase-out of the US military presence on Taiwan. The US military presence on the island was completed in 1979 as Carter unilaterally annulled the mutual defense treaty with Taiwan.
The other is the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The US and the then USSR defused their nuclear standoff as Kennedy unilaterally dismantled American nuclear missiles from Turkey and Italy without prior consultation with the two countries and Moscow shipped back its nuclear missiles from Cuba.
Writing in the May 30, 2017 New York Times Dr. Graham Allison, Director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School, urged Trump to think the unthinkable with North Koreaby ending the American military presence in South Korea.
In an interview with Bloomberg January 21, 2017 retired Air Force General Merrill “Tony” McPeak said “it is too late to roll back”the rapidly advancing North Korean nuclear weapons program and honestly stated:
“We could even take our forces off the peninsula. From my point of view, thats a negotiating point. I’d rather do that than watch San Francisco evaporate.
Gen. McPeak added:
“Yes, airpower could win wars, but the one place where it absolutely couldnt was North Korea.
“I think it’s possible that we can (live with a nuclear-armed North Korea.)
“For the U.S., the threat here is to Chicago and to New York City. We cant allow the North Korean government to get the capability to hold major American cities hostage. And if they dont have it already, they soon will
,Atlantic Council senior fellow Todd Rosenblum, former acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and America’s Security Affairs. Wrote in Politico July 18, 2017::
“Its time to consider what was once unthinkable: Removing U.S. troops from the Korean Peninsula.
“The U.S., then, could soon face two horrible options: start a catastrophic war that would kill hundreds of thousands of South Koreans or live with a nuclear-armed North Korea capable of striking Washington.
“Given the stakes, it’s time to consider a new approach—even idea’s once considered unthinkable.”
In his November 30, 2017 Los Angeles Times November op-ed, David Rothkopf , a senior fellow at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, concluded: Trump has no interest in trading New York, Washington, DC and other cities for Tokyo and Seoul.
“As great as the risk of nuclear war seems, common sense and self-interest are likely to prevail because that is what most often happens in international affairs.
“And now, with the possible destruction of one or more U.S. cities on the table, it is even more certain we wouldn’t undertake the risk.”
Fifth. The summit would enable Kim Jong Un to initiate the long-elusive process to preside over the reunification under the umbrella of a bi-system confederation.
A most significant fallout of the summit would be the prospect of Kim Jong Un setting upon the process of putting the long-awaited period on the tragic bisection of the ancestral Land of Morning Calm.
The withdrawal of American troops from South Korea, coming in the wake of the 2017 achievement of full nuclear weapons capability, would mean the extraction of the fundamental factor that caused the division of the Korean Peninsula and have kept it perpetuated to date.
No wonder, Kim Jong Un, credited with ending the American military presence in South Korea, should preside over the great cause of Korean reintegration, no less.
Sixth. Kim Jong Un is the 21st century Kwanggaedo the Great, great tamer of the US, architect of Korean reunification and most jealous guardian of world peace and security.
It has been most succinctly demonstrated beyond any doubt that Kim Jong Un has what it takes to be the 21stcentury Kwanggaedo the Great26, brilliant tamer of the US, great architect of the independent and peaceful reunification of Korea and most jealous guardian of world peace and security, saving mankind from a nuclear Armageddon.
First and foremost, it is nothing short of a miracle that Kim Jong Un will have pulled off the feat of taming the US without fighting war, neutralizing its military presence in the Far East and achieving the historic cause of Korean reunification.
With one New Year address has Kim Jong Un brought North and South Korea back on the road to reconciliation and cooperation. With just one verbal invitation communicated by a South Korean envoy has the North Korean supreme leader has short-circuited all the war talk in Washington, while getting willing Trump to agree to meet with him
It is a really great deal when the young leader of North Korea has been able to inspire its population to unite behind him as one body and make the best of adversity in the face of military, political and economic pressure mounted by the Americans and their followers.
We should call it a much greater deal that he has successfully morphed North Korea into a full-fledged nuclear weapons state complete with ICBMs and SLBMs, each capable of carrying multiple independently targetable reentry nuclear vehicle.
An emerging lesson is that what is important for a given nation is not the matter of having a large territory, a large population and a prosperous economy but that of having a great, wise benevolent fatherly leader capable of playing a poor hand well.
What is the best description of Kim Jong Un, when he has got the President of the US to be overeager to meet with him without raising any preconditions even in the absence of any official written invitation or its confirmation by the North Koreans?
He is on the cusp of out-trumping the United States, forcing it to militarily disengage from Korea and Japan, achieving the reunification of Korea, removing the long-smoldering flashpoint once and for all..
It is time for people all over the world to join two American experts Joel Wit and Van Jackson, in grudgingly taking their hats off to Kim Jong Un and his heroic people.
Former American nuclear negotiator Joel Wit wrote his oped in the January 16, 2016 New York Times:
“I probably shouldn’t say this, but I take my hat off to the North Koreans. They have played their cards extremely well. Despite this episodic outrage, they have managed to become a full-fledged small nuclear power with a growing and increasingly sophisticated arsenal.”
Former Pentagon official Van Jackson said to the March 9, 2018 Washington Post:
“So I have to grudgingly take my hat off to him because he’s played a very poor hand brilliantly to get there.”
A widely-shared agreement among observers is that Kim Jong Un can be best described as heaven-sent savior of the Korean nation and mankind, the greatest of the greatest statesmen in recorded history and the third ever-victorious iron-willed brilliant commander after Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il.
By Kim Myong Chol, PhD, Tokyo, Japan
This article was first published by Minjok Tongshin in US on April 2, 2018
The 21st Century