Great article from India on Trump and NK and India
National Herald
May 22, 2018
By Ashis Ray (former head journalist for CNN in India)
...Kim is unlikely to be an idiot... Trump is living in a fool’s paradise if he thinks the North Korean leader will imminently surrender his nuclear weapons, that, too, without securing anything significant in return. Moon, the central figure, was, therefore, compelled to hurry to Washington to tackle uncertainty over the scheduled Trump-Kim meeting in Singapore on 12 June. US administration officials were reliably quoted as saying the US president had “begun pressing his aides and allies about whether he should take the risk of proceeding” with a summit encouraged and facilitated by Moon.
Kim may be isolated from the real world; but he is unlikely to be an idiot. Indeed, Trump’s extreme right-wing national security adviser John Bolton’s comments that the US was pursuing the “Libya model” not unexpectedly drew a sharp response from Pyongyang. Kim cannot be oblivious of the fate that befell Muammar Gaddafi after he gave up his nuclear options. To Kim, denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula means a nuclear free East Asia region sometime in the future, not just a North Korea stripped of nuclear weapons.
Far from hinting at unilateral denuclearisation, North Korea has not even reiterated statements hitherto given to Presidents Bill Clinton and George W Bush. Jeffrey Lewis, an American expert on non-proliferation in East Asia, was quoted as saying: “I have said from the beginning that this is a fiasco of the White House’s own making and we should not let them shift the blame to Pyongyang. No one double-crossed you; Trump is just a moron.”
https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/opinion/narendra-modis-damage-control-diplomacy
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