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anonymous
2019 Feb 28, 6:36pm
Why Hanoi failed
President Trump and Chairman Kim are returning to their respective capitals empty-handed, with conflicting explanations for how talks broke down and where we go from here.
Why it matters: Trump showed both flexibility — he backed off the long-standing U.S. demand that any deal requires complete and verifiable denuclearization — and a willingness to walk away. The summit also laid bare the limits to his charisma-based negotiating style and revealed how far the two sides are from agreeing to anything of substance.
Catch up quick: In a press conference this morning, Trump looked dejected but still called Kim “quite a guy,” said progress had been made, and he insisted the U.S. was on track to become “very good friends with Chairman Kim and with North Korea.”
•The North Koreans then held an unexpected, late-night press conference to contradict Trump’s claim that Kim had demanded all sanctions be waived in exchange for partial denuclearization. Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui also said her “impression” is that Kim “has lost the will to engage in deal-making” with the U.S.
Between the lines: North Korea’s demands on sanctions relief still went far beyond what was likely to be accepted in exchange for limited steps toward denuclearization.
•Jung Pak, a former CIA analyst now at Brookings, emails that Trump “demonstrating his desire for substantive actions on denuclearization was important because Kim has been ignoring U.S. negotiators and banking on his personal appeals to Trump, whom he probably judged was more malleable.”
While the abrupt ending of the summit was a surprise, the absence of a major breakthrough was not.
•Jim Walsh, an international security expert at MIT who has negotiated with North Korea, says the two sides “squandered their time since Singapore,” adding: “It took 2 years of intense, regular negotiation to get the Iran deal. And Iran is easier. … So no, 30 days and winging it isn’t going to get it done.”
Trump was told — and the expert community has long stressed — that Kim wanted immediate sanctions relief,” says Van Jackson, a former Pentagon strategist and author of "On the Brink: Trump, Kim, and the Threat of Nuclear War." “Because most sanctions are by legislation and not executive order, that meant Trump literally couldn't give Kim what he wanted.
But Trump went ahead with the summit anyway out of a heady mix of hubris and ignorance.”
The question now is whether this was a bump in the road or if we’ve now veered entirely off course.
•Bruce Klingner, a former CIA official now at Heritage, isn't expecting a return to fire and fury in the short term, given Kim "promised not to resume nuclear or missile testing" — at least according to Trump — and the U.S. has shown no interest in "activity that could trigger a strong North Korean response."
•“The negotiations will resume sooner or later, and the misfortune in Hanoi might impart a different kind of momentum to what is destined to be a fluctuating, arduous diplomatic process," Gi-Wook Shin of Stanford University writes for Axios Expert Voices.
Behind the scenes: For the South Koreans and anyone banking on positive momentum, this was a bad outcome. As Axios’ Jonathan Swan points out, hawks like John Bolton won’t share that disappointment.
The bottom line: “Now that many of the critics ... have got what they wanted — a tougher approach to North Korea — they have to accept the consequences, whatever they may be,” write Joel Wit and Jenny Town of 38 North.
https://www.axios.com/will-us-and-north-korea-go-to-war-hanoi-summit-e3dca82e-5eb8-48f4-94a0-18cd66e1ba9d.html
President Trump and Chairman Kim are returning to their respective capitals empty-handed, with conflicting explanations for how talks broke down and where we go from here.
Why it matters: Trump showed both flexibility — he backed off the long-standing U.S. demand that any deal requires complete and verifiable denuclearization — and a willingness to walk away. The summit also laid bare the limits to his charisma-based negotiating style and revealed how far the two sides are from agreeing to anything of substance.
Catch up quick: In a press conference this morning, Trump looked dejected but still called Kim “quite a guy,” said progress had been made, and he insisted the U.S. was on track to become “very good friends with Chairman Kim and with North Korea.”
•The North Koreans then held an unexpected, late-night press conference to contradict Trump’s claim that Kim had demanded all sanctions be waived in exchange for partial denuclearization. Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui also said her “impression” is that Kim “has lost the will to engage in deal-making” with the U.S.
Between the lines: North Korea’s demands on sanctions relief still went far beyond what was likely to be accepted in exchange for limited steps toward denuclearization.
•Jung Pak, a former CIA analyst now at Brookings, emails that Trump “demonstrating his desire for substantive actions on denuclearization was important because Kim has been ignoring U.S. negotiators and banking on his personal appeals to Trump, whom he probably judged was more malleable.”
While the abrupt ending of the summit was a surprise, the absence of a major breakthrough was not.
•Jim Walsh, an international security expert at MIT who has negotiated with North Korea, says the two sides “squandered their time since Singapore,” adding: “It took 2 years of intense, regular negotiation to get the Iran deal. And Iran is easier. … So no, 30 days and winging it isn’t going to get it done.”
Trump was told — and the expert community has long stressed — that Kim wanted immediate sanctions relief,” says Van Jackson, a former Pentagon strategist and author of "On the Brink: Trump, Kim, and the Threat of Nuclear War." “Because most sanctions are by legislation and not executive order, that meant Trump literally couldn't give Kim what he wanted.
But Trump went ahead with the summit anyway out of a heady mix of hubris and ignorance.”
The question now is whether this was a bump in the road or if we’ve now veered entirely off course.
•Bruce Klingner, a former CIA official now at Heritage, isn't expecting a return to fire and fury in the short term, given Kim "promised not to resume nuclear or missile testing" — at least according to Trump — and the U.S. has shown no interest in "activity that could trigger a strong North Korean response."
•“The negotiations will resume sooner or later, and the misfortune in Hanoi might impart a different kind of momentum to what is destined to be a fluctuating, arduous diplomatic process," Gi-Wook Shin of Stanford University writes for Axios Expert Voices.
Behind the scenes: For the South Koreans and anyone banking on positive momentum, this was a bad outcome. As Axios’ Jonathan Swan points out, hawks like John Bolton won’t share that disappointment.
The bottom line: “Now that many of the critics ... have got what they wanted — a tougher approach to North Korea — they have to accept the consequences, whatever they may be,” write Joel Wit and Jenny Town of 38 North.
https://www.axios.com/will-us-and-north-korea-go-to-war-hanoi-summit-e3dca82e-5eb8-48f4-94a0-18cd66e1ba9d.html
The US has broken promises and treaties in every corner of the globe. The US ignores the UN Charter, which is a treaty. It flouts international law, which is based on treaties. The US habitually starts asymmetrical wars, which is aggression and the worst of all war crimes. It destroys nations, leaving millions of people dead, dying, and in misery.
Libya was once a prosperous nation. Muammar Gaddafi was an eccentric dictator, but he had a love for Libya and its people. Under Gaddafi the people enjoyed a high standard of living, economic freedom, and gender equality. Education and medical care were free. Having a home and food was considered a human right. Libya’s oil wealth benefited the people.
Gaddafi was attacked and vilified by the US for decades. After the attacks on the US of September 11, 2001 Gaddafi cooperated with the US in the War on Terror. That is not to say that the War on Terror was a good thing, but Gaddafi was being US friendly. In further efforts to establish friendly relations with the US, Gaddafi denuclearized in 2003. President George W. Bush praised Libya for denuclearizing and suggested Libya as a model for North Korea. In 2011 President Obama wantonly destroyed Libya and conspired in Gaddafi’s assassination. Obama’s Secretary of State gloated afterwards “we came, we saw, he died…ha,ha,ha”.
Even if North Korea completely and forever denuclearizes Kim Jong-un can never be assured that one day the US won’t try to do the same thing to North Korea that it did to Libya. North Korea can never put its trust in the US, because the US has proved itself untrustworthy over and over again.
Iraq did not have a nuclear weapons program since the early 1990’s. After the First Gulf War in 1991, Saddam Hussein cooperated with the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors right up until the US invasion in 2003. The weapons inspectors advised against the invasion and recommended that the inspections be continued. President George W. Bush invaded anyway based on known lies t hat Saddam Hussein had a nuclear weapons program. After the invasion and destruction of Iraq, 1625 weapons inspectors spent the next 2 years searching Iraq and found no weapons of mass destruction.
The US continues to accuse Iran of having a nuclear weapons program even though the IAEA certifies that it doesn’t, and all 16 US intelligence agencies have said that Iran has not had an active nuclear weapons program since 2003. Facts do not matter to the US. It creates its own reality. Based on its own unreality, the US can invent any reason it wants to impose sanctions and invade asymmetrical countries.
Iraq denuclearized, Libya denuclearized and Iran denuclearized. The US invaded Iraq based on the unreality of the existence of nuclear weapons. Libya was invaded based on the invented unreality that the invasion was for human rights. The US has imposed sanctions on Venezuela because it does not consider it “democratic enough”. The US has imposed sanction against Russia because of its alleged invasion of Ukraine, after a US instigated putsch.
If North Korea completely denuclearizes and the US removes all economic sanctions, there is no way to guarantee that some future US president won’t accuse North Korea of secretly harboring a nuclear program. Or the US can invent a false flag event or use a “red-herring” to impose economic sanctions. A red-herring is an issue that distracts from the real issue.
Economic sanctions are financial weapons of mass destruction that kill hundreds of thousands of people. The US can always find a red-herring excuse for imposing sanctions, as it has with Venezuela. With Venezuela the real issue is not democracy. Venezuela has regular elections, while the USA backs many dictators and absolute monarchs all over the world. The real issue is that Venezuela nationalized its oil wealth to benefit its own people, costing Exxon and other US oil corporations billions of dollars in profits.
Human rights in North Korea is a red-herring, which the US propaganda mills keep grinding out. North Korean defectors are paid a reward up to $860,000 depending on their intelligence and propaganda value. Tales of North Korean human rights abuses are not based on facts, but are rumors based on rumors and propaganda. The US does not care about human rights. The only thing the US foreign policy cares about is its empire and taking care of US corporate interests around the world. Otherwise the US would do something about Saudi Arabia’s human rights abuses.
Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy and the most brutal regime in the world. The US is an accomplice to Saudi Arabia’s genocidal bombing and blockade of Yemen, which is starving millions of civilians. Saudi Arabia beheads or crucifies over 100 prisoners every year. One never hears a peep out of the US State Department about human rights in Saudi Arabia.
The US never squawks about human rights in Columbia, Egypt, Honduras, Israel, Rwanda, Turkey, Ukraine, or its own atrocious human rights record. The US has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners; yet it constantly harps about North Korea allegedly having a “gulag of 200,000 political prisoners”.
The US has made a political issue of the tragic death of Otto Warmbier, yet the Hamilton County, Ohio coroner report says it found no evidence that he was tortured while a prisoner in North Korea. The US is using his death for propaganda, and not because it cares about an individual life.
The US has killed millions of civilians in its illegal wars of aggression, bombed thousands of hospitals, schools and civilian infrastructures over the past 70 years. The US has black sites where it tortures victims that it has abducted and imprisoned secretly and illegally. The US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Torture Report is evidence that the US has tortured to death prisoners in black sites and at Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
Between 1948 and 1987 South Korea was ruled by US puppet dictators, such as Syngman Rhee and Park Chung-Hee. They killed, tortured, and imprisoned without trial hundreds of thousands of South Koreans they considered dissidents. South Korea still enforces it repressive National Security Act, which is a violation of human rights. The law criminalizes political views it considers unpatriotic. Peace activists risk being thrown in prison. It is a crime in South Korea to associate with anyone even suspected of being a communist or sympathetic to North Korea. South Korea has thousands of political prisoners under the National Security Act.
North Korea’s missiles are another red herring issue. It is not against international law for a country to have missiles, even intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM). Every country has the right to have missiles for self-defense, launch satellites and explore outer space. Actually it is not against any international law for a country who is not a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to have nuclear weapons. North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2003, which it had every legal right to do.
North Korea has missiles and nuclear weapons because the US has been threatening it with invasion and nuclear weapons since 1953. North Korea is a poor country, and it is economically less costly for self-defense to have nuclear weapons and missiles than to maintaining a modern air force and keep up the conventional arms race with South Korea.
The threat of war in Korea has its roots in Washington and not in Pyongyang. It is the USA that is the aggressor. The US is a savagely violent and aggressive nation with the ambition of an empire that rules the world. It demands that other nations submit to its will. The US does not hesitate to use overwhelming violence against small nations to enforce its hegemony. It will punish them until they submit or until they are so utterly destroyed that they are an example to other countries that even think about disobeying US dictates. During the Korean War the US killed 3 million Koreans. The US killed another 5 millionSouth East Asians during the Vietnam War. Millions have been killed in the War on Terror. Civilians are the main victims.
The power of the US is so enormous that if it were not so tragic it would be laughable when the US claims that it is being threatened by North Korea. North Korea is a nation of 25 million peasants, with a Gross Domestic Product of approximately $20 billion, and a military budget of $6 billion. It is not a threat to the national security of the US, with its high-tech military and a budget that exceeds $1 trillion dollars per year.
A war with the U.S. would be madness. Kim Jong-un and his government are not insane, but the many US war mongers and war criminals such as John Bolton are. The US has a long history of war madness, most recently in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine.
It is nuclear madness for the US to move NATO to Russia’s border. In the US instigated putsch in Ukraine, the Obama administration admittedthat it was willing to risk a nuclear war with Russia. The Pentagon insanely plans for limited nuclear wars and winnable nuclear wars. The US has an insane first strike policy, which means that other nuclear powered adversaries have to keep their nuclear arsenal on a hair-trigger alert. The risks of a nuclear accident are enormous. The US has pushed the doomsday clock to 2 minutes until Armageddon.
North Korea is not paranoid to fear the US and prepare its defenses accordingly. North Korea is well aware of the US’s use of total warfare against its adversaries. Total warfare means that nobody including the enemy’s civilian population is off limits, and that nothing, including civilian infrastructure is exempt from destruction. Total warfare also means that international laws, treaties and the norms of civilized warfare do not restrain the US. North Korea was a victim of US total warfare in the 1950’s. It wants to avoid a repeat of that war by having a credible deterrent for self-defense.
Most Americans are unaware of the war crimes that the US committed during the Korean War, but almost every Korean knows, in both the North and the South. On rare occasions a mainstream media outlet such as The Washington Post will have an article such as “The U.S. War Crime North Korea won’t Forget”. More often the alternative media is the best source of historical truth. Jay Jason has written an excellent article on US war crimes: “Negotiations? Third World Nations be Aware! Americans Napalmed and Bombed Out All 38 North Korean Cities!”.
The US bombed Korea with 635,000 tons of high explosive. The US perfected napalm during the Korean War and dropped 32,500 tons of it on Korea. When the US eventually ran out of targets it bombed North Korea’s irrigation dams, which flooded croplands causing mass starvation of civilians.
The US used germ warfare against North Korea and China. The U.S. dropped insect and animal vectors with black plague, smallpox, cholera, encephalitis, anthrax and other deadly diseases. Dave Chaddock wrote an excellently researched book on the subject: “This Must Be the Place: How the U.S. Waged Germ Warfare in the Korean War and Denied It Ever Since”. David Swanson interviewed Dave Chaddock on Talk Nation Radio. Jeff Brown, author of “China Rising, Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destination” has created an online library for researchers of US biological warfare: Bioweapon Truth Commission Global Online Library.
The definitive work proving that the US used germ warfare in Korea is the 1999 book by Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman: “The United States and Biological Warfare, Secrets of the Early Cold War and Korea”. It was the captured pilots’ confessions of participating in germ warfare that led the CIA to come up with the ludicrous fiction of U.S. prisoners being brainwashed. Brainwashing is a myth, but it was popularized by US propaganda and the Hollywood film “The Manchurian Candidate” in order to cover up US germ warfare.
Some in the CIA must not have gotten the memorandum that brainwashing was a fiction. From 1953 to 1973 the CIA launched a secret human experiment program on mind control, named MK-Ultra. Some of the experimental participants volunteered, and others where experimented on without their permission. The CIA used everything from torture, electric shock treatment and drugs to try and reproduce the alleged brainwashing of Korean War prisoners. It never succeeded, and often the results were tragic. CIA scientist Frank Olson fell or was pushed from a New York hotel window after he unknowingly took LSD in a CIA experiment.
The mainstream propaganda media keeps screaming that North Korea cannot be trusted to keep its word. Yet it was the US that violated the 1953 Korean War armistice agreement by nuclearizing the Korean peninsula. In 1957 President Dwight D. Eisenhower equipped US forces in Korea with“dual capability (nuclear) weapons, such as the Honest John and the 280 mm. cannon“, in violation of section 13 (d). The US had at least 950 nuclear weapons in South Korea until President George H. W. Bush said that he withdrew them in 1991. The US still has plenty of nuclear weapons in the air and on the sea that it constantly uses to threaten North Korea.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/06/why-north-korea-can-never-trust-the-u-s.html