![\"MSNBC:](\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/MSNBC-Korea-Summit.jpg\")
<\/p>\nMSNBC<\/strong>‘s Rachel Maddow (6\/12\/18) appears dismayed by the manifestation of a US president meeting with an Official Enemy.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n On MSNBC<\/b>\u2019s Rachel Maddow Show<\/b><\/a>, the host was aghast (6\/12\/18) that the US says it will halt the annual war games it conducts with South Korea on North Korea\u2019s doorstep, because doing so is \u201can absolute jackpot for the North Korean dictator,\u201d \u201cone of the things he wants most on earth,\u201d and now Washington \u201chas just given them that for free, for nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n Maddow implied that Trump has taken this step out of fealty to Russia, and complained that pausing war games that threaten North Korea benefits Russia and China. She twice called the Kim\/Trump summit a \u201cwedding,\u201d twice said that the two leaders \u201clove\u201d each other two times, and referred to Kim as Trump\u2019s \u201cbest friend.\u201d In other words, de-escalation is for wimps, and what\u2019s needed is toughness, even if it risks nuclear war.<\/p>\n Not once did Maddow demonstrate the slightest concern with avoiding war. The message of her segment is that the US should subject all 25 million people in North Korea to the threat of nuclear annihilation until its leaders do what the US says, a threat that necessarily extends to the rest of East Asia, since it would be decimated in any nuclear exchange, to say nothing of the likely devastating effects on the rest of the world.<\/p>\n The Washington Post\u00a0<\/strong>(6\/12\/18<\/a>) warned against trusting “a cruel and unpredictable ruler whose motives and aims are far from clear”\u2014referring to Kim Jong-un.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The editorial board of the Washington Post<\/b> (6\/12\/18<\/a>) says that diplomacy \u201cis certainly preferable to the slide toward war that appeared to be underway last year,\u201d but opposes taking steps to prevent another Korean War\u2014a nuclear one, this time. The editorialists complain that the joint statement issued by the leaders of the US and North Korea makes no mention of \u201cUS terms for disarmament\u201d: What the editorial, tellingly titled \u201cNo More Concessions,\u201d is saying is that the predetermined outcome of diplomacy should be complete North Korea acquiescence to US demands\u2014which, of course, isn\u2019t diplomacy at all.<\/p>\n Similarly, the New York Times<\/b>\u2019 editorial board (6\/12\/18<\/a>) writes that \u201cafter months of venomous barbs and apocalyptic threats of war, the meeting between President Trump and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, was unquestionably a relief.\u201d Trump, they wrote, \u201cseems seized with the need to resolve it peacefully. That is to the good.\u201d Yet the editorial lists measures that Times<\/strong> believes the Democratic People\u2019s Republic of Korea (DPRK, North Korea\u2019s official name) needs to take, without saying that America should do anything, and expresses anxiety over the break in war games.<\/p>\n In the same vein, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times<\/b> (6\/12\/18<\/a>) says that \u201cit certainly is better for the two leaders to be exchanging compliments rather than missiles,\u201d but describes the US suspending military exercises with South Korea as a \u201cconcession\u201d for which America is getting \u201castonishingly little\u201d in return. He purports to be against the exchanging of missiles, but thinks it\u2019s a mistake to take steps to minimize the threat of exchanging missiles.<\/p>\n While acknowledging that Trump being “snookered” is “far better than war,” New York Times<\/strong> columnist Nicholas Kristof (6\/12\/18<\/a>) worried that “the cancellation of military exercises will raise questions among our allies.”<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cAstonishingly,\u201d Kristof writes, Trump<\/p>\n even adopted North Korean positions as his own, saying that the United States military exercises in the region are \u201cprovocative.\u201d That\u2019s a standard North Korean propaganda line.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The columnist failed to explain how military exercises on North Korea\u2019s doorstep, involving<\/a> 50,000 South Korean troops and 17,500 of their American counterparts, are anything other than \u201cprovocative,\u201d but evidently Kristof would have no problem with joint DPRK\/Mexico maneuvers near the US southern border pretending to launch an attack featuring 67,500 soldiers, along with simulated nuclear bomber attacks (FAIR.org<\/b>, 4\/3\/13<\/a>).<\/p>\n The Times<\/b>\u2019 editorial is as bemused as Kristof, writing that Trump \u201ceven endorsed the North Korean view of such joint exercises as \u2018provocative.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Kristof criticized the joint statement because it says<\/p>\n nothing about North Korea freezing plutonium and uranium programs, nothing about destroying intercontinental ballistic missiles, nothing about allowing inspectors to return to nuclear sites, nothing about North Korea making a full declaration of its nuclear program, nothing about a timetable, nothing about verification, not even any clear pledge to permanently halt testing of nuclear weapons or long-range missiles.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n At no point did Kristof call on the US to take any remotely comparable steps.<\/p>\n The Washington Post<\/strong>‘s Anne Applebaum (6\/12\/18<\/a>) does not seem to see Trump and Kim ceasing to threaten each other’s countries with nuclear destruction as a “gain” for those countries. For Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post<\/b> (6\/12\/18<\/a>), provisionally scaling back American hostility to North Korea should be understood as a humiliation. She wrote that<\/p>\n had any previous American president, Republican or Democrat, emerged from an event like this, in which so much was given away with so little to show for it, he would have been embarrassed.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Her article was headlined, \u201cTrump and Kim Got What They Wanted. The Rest of the World, Not So Much.\u201d It\u2019s likely, however, that \u201cthe rest of the world\u201d does not want nuclear war, and might want steps that could help avert that danger\u2014such as, say, an end to nuclear-armed America antagonizing another nuclear power by having<\/a> \u201ctens of thousands of US and [South Korean] troops, aircraft and naval vessels engaged in mock clashes\u201d with that power.<\/p>\n Undergirding the view that the United States should only negotiate with North Korea when \u201cnegotiation\u201d means \u201cforcing the DPRK under nuclear duress to do whatever America says\u201d are entrenched notions of intrinsic US superiority.<\/p>\n Probably the most blatant example of this is the view that the United States is \u201clegitimizing\u201d DPRK by meeting with its leaders. MSNBC<\/b>\u2019s Maddow seems to find it blasphemous that the summit \u201cbilled\u201d North Korea \u201cas a nation equal in stature to the United States.\u201d According to the Times<\/b>, Kim got a \u201cwin\u201d by receiving the \u201clegitimacy of being treated as an equal as a nuclear power on the world stage, country flags standing side by side.\u201d The Post<\/b> was incensed that Kim was \u201cable to parade on the global stage as a legitimate statesman,\u201d while Applebaum said that \u201cthe flags and the handshake will reinforce Kim\u2019s legitimacy and make him harder to depose.\u201d<\/p>\n States, and the parties that govern them, are not granted legitimacy by the United States. Legally, that legitimacy comes from United Nations recognition or its absence; as a practical matter, states and their leaders establish legitimacy through what the Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci described<\/a> as a combination of coercion and consent. Believing that the US has the power to confer or deny legitimacy on other countries or their leaders is part of the same imperial hubris that makes pundits panic about tentative moves in the direction of curtailing America belligerence toward North Korea, and thus the threat of nuclear war.<\/p>\n We would find in absurd if pundits complained that Kim failed to extract a promise from Trump to halt the thousand or so extrajudicial executions<\/a> that take place in the United States every year.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n A comparable dynamic is at work in the commentariat concern-trolling about North Korean human rights. Maddow was perplexed that the US would meet with North Korea without the North Korean leadership making any promises about \u201ctheir behavior toward their own people.\u201d The Times<\/b>\u2019 editors considered it \u201cstartling\u201d that the joint Kim\/Trump statement contains no reference to human rights in DPRK.<\/p>\n In this conception, America is the shining city on a hill that must free the people of the DPRK, though these analysts don’t ask who will liberate US citizens living under a regime with the highest incarceration rate<\/a> in the world, rampant judicial<\/a> and extrajudicial<\/a> execution, widespread racism<\/a>, obscene wealth inequality<\/a> and an undemocratic<\/a> political system. Calling for a US government crusade for change inside North Korea while overlooking all of these features of US society is another dimension of the imperial arrogance that insists it\u2019s legitimate to subject the entire population of other nations to crushing sanctions<\/a> and violent threats until their governments give Washington everything it wants.<\/p>\n Nor do any of these commentators address the possibility that the US ruling class might need to change its global conduct: The hanging of Saddam Hussein and the sodomizing to death<\/a> of Moammar Gadhafi, neither of whom possessed nuclear weapons with which to deter America from invading and destroying the countries they governed, could be a reason why the leaders of North Korea want nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n For the punditry, the goal of US\/North Korea talks isn\u2019t lasting peace on the Korean peninsula, it\u2019s total North Korean submission to US commands. Corporate media appear to be more worried about the United States being successfully defied than it is about nuclear war.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/span> Media outlets don\u2019t want America to negotiate with North Korea; they want the US to hold \u00a0North Korea for ransom. MSNBC‘s Rachel Maddow (6\/12\/18) appears dismayed by the manifestation of a US president meeting with an Official Enemy. On MSNBC\u2019s Rachel Maddow Show, the host was aghast (6\/12\/18) that the US says it will halt […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2521,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-365474","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2521"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=365474"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365474\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=365474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=365474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=365474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"WaPo:](\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/WaPo-No-More-Concessions.png\")
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![\"WaPo:](\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/WaPo-Trump-Kim.png\")
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Shining City on a Hill<\/h2>\n
![\"Washington](\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/WaPo-Police-Killings.png\")
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\nThis piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission from FAIR<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"