Trump’s North Korean Policy Is Succeeding

Here is Conrad Black on Trump’s North Korea success:

He has secured Kim Jong-un’s acquiescence to the agreed objective.

The president’s idiosyncratic methods conceal the strength of his effort to reverse the disintegration of America as a Great Power and a just force in the world. Beneath or with his almost avuncular comments on Kim Jong-un being “a nice guy,” Trump has gained Kim’s formal acquiescence to his definition of denuclearization in exchange for contemporaneous wind-down of sanctions and of the close presence of overwhelming military force. As a bonus, Kim can be the new Deng Xiao-ping and lead North Korea to prosperity while preserving the Kimist dictatorship. The sanctions will remain until the nuclear military program has been dismantled, and if there is a resumption of progress toward deployable nuclear ICBMs, the U.S. will exercise its military option. The U.S. Navy in the augmented Seventh Fleet off shore has the cruise missiles necessary to decalibrate the artillery focused on the immense city of Seoul, South Korea, just across the 38th parallel, and the Fleet’s nearly 300 aircraft in the carriers Nimitz, Theodore Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan certainly possess the power to dispose of the few authentic nuclear sites Kim possesses. The achievement is in securing Kim’s acquiescence to the agreed objective, and, whatever waffling and chicanery may yet occur, implicitly to the penalties that will be imposed if the nuclear program is resumed.

Senator Ed Markey (D., Mass.) — who announced as the president emplaned for Singapore that the U.S. military and civilians in South Korea would all be hostages in the face of conflict, that the U.S. would suffer greater casualties than in the Korean War, and that “there is no military option” — laid naked the bankruptcy and ignorance of the bipartisan bad policy that brought matters to this extremity. If there wasn’t a military option this meeting would not have happened. The hypocrisy of the Democrats, elected and in the media, is picturesque.

Read more: National Review

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