Trump bets on North Korea to break his losing streak

[DonViejo]

The president is quickly turning his sights toward a second nuclear summit with North Korea that could reset a political narrative of domestic frustration.

By ELIANA JOHNSON 02/17/2019 06:53 AM EST

Stung by domestic defeat after a losing battle with Democrats in Washington, D.C., this winter, President Donald Trump hopes his negotiating skills can achieve better results some 8,000 miles away when he meets with North Korea’s leader in Vietnam later this month.

Trump will travel for his second session with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un to discuss whether the strongman might relinquish his nuclear weapons in return for an end to economic isolation.

Skeptics call it a fool’s errand. But even some harsh critics of Trump’s foreign policy hold open the possibility that the president mught find it easier to deal with the diminutive Asian tyrant than with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

At a minimum, the Hanoi summit offers Trump a chance to shift a losing political narrative which dates back to the drubbing his party took in November’s midterm elections.

“A lot of positive things are going on,” Trump insisted in a Friday White House news conference mostly devoted to his frustration that Congress had denied him on the border wall funding he’d long demanded. “We’re working on a summit,” he added, predicting that it “will be a very successful one.”

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https://www.politico.com/story/2019/02/17/trump-north-korea-summit-1173297

[NCjack]

1. KJU sees the fear in LOSER45's eyes and will play him like a fiddle. Speaker Pelosi

should go to NK as the negotiator to get USA a good deal with NK.

TARGET45 should stay home and be available for pre-indictment interviews by Special Prosecutor Mueller.

[Hugin]

2. Not worried.

Old Yeller can't even run a casino.

[Polly Hennessey]

3. Well,

it didn’t work the first time.

[soryang]

4. The administration is taking a piecemeal approach to negotiation

The so called phased or step by step approach with reciprocal concessions. Therefore it would be difficult to characterize it as a sweeping success, even if there are positive concessions from North Korea. Early on Bolton castigated this approach and preferred the unrealistic "one bundle" or "Libyan approach," to negotiations which demonstrates his incompetence in Asian affairs if not in diplomacy generally.

The negotiations will begin to look like what occurred before in the six party talks, and agreed framework. This has been the inevitable trend all along, although the administration denied it at the outset because it contradicted their campaign promises. The negotiating approach will look more and more like the previous democratic approach to North Korean denuclearization in the past.

Whether the second summit is a "success" or not, will be more about the spin put on it by the media than anything else. Negotiations are a process, they can fail in a moment, but they can only "succeed" over a protracted period of hard work by people who know what they are doing. Any concessions by the US in return for concrete steps to disable nuclear production facilities and open them to inspection will predictably result in a media and MIC think tank uproar.

Fortunately, Biegun appears to be at this point, more competent, than any other person the administration has. We can tell this from the criticism from the Washington Post's Josh Rogin:

The State Department has been working on better coordination with Seoul, establishing a working group under special envoy Stephen Biegun, the lead U.S. negotiator. But recent reports suggest the United States is moving closer to Moon’s position, not the other way around.

The negotiations should be left to Biegun and his working group. But inevitably whatever happens at the summit will become a domestic political football disconnected from the real issues.

https://civilizationdiscontents.blogspot.com/2019/02/interim-us-negotiating-strategy.html

[spanone]

5. Regardless of what happens in Vietnam, you know he will hail it as the greatest 'summit' ever.

why? because he's full of shit.

[UniteFightBack]

6. Oh goody more propaganda pics for NK showing the fake prez capitulating. Does the rest of America

see this for the farce that it is?

[keithbvadu2]

7. Dotard says Rocketman Kim is "very honorable".