Scads of analysts and pundits have weighed in on the Trump-Kim summit talks in Singapore, parsing the brief agreement and presidential tweets for signs of just how strongly it actually commits North Korea to total, verifiable \u201cdenuclearization.\u201d<\/p>\n
Most of them are missing the point. The real threat to U.S., Korean, and Japanese security of late has come not from North Korean nukes, but from threats by President Donald Trump and his closest advisers to launch a regional war to preempt any further North Korean progress on warhead and missile technology. Some experts were giving even odds of a U.S.-initiated war as recently as a few months ago.<\/p>\n
So even if the spectacle in Singapore was more theater than substance, even if the president\u2019s effusive praise for a totalitarian leader was hard to swallow, we should applaud Trump for belatedly making good on his 2016\u00a0campaign promise\u00a0to sit down with Kim Jong-un over a hamburger in search of peace.<\/p>\n
Throughout most of 2017, the Trump administration instead issued a steady stream of pronouncements warning that it was ready to go to war to\u00a0stop Pyongyang\u00a0from perfecting long-range missiles capable of hitting the United States with nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur president has been really clear about this,\u201d\u00a0said then National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster. \u201cHe is willing to do anything necessary to prevent that from happening . . . and so, all of our armed forces are getting to really a high, high degree of readiness for this mission.\u201d U.S.-South Korean war games\u00a0reportedly included\u00a0\u201crehearsals of surgical strikes on North Korea\u2019s main nuclear and missile facilities and \u2018decapitation raids\u2019 by special forces targeting the North\u2019s leadership.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump himself\u00a0warned\u00a0last summer that he would meet any further North Korean nuclear…<\/p>\n