Thursday, February 28, 2019

Korea - Vietnam

The meeting with North Korea in Vietnam didn't result in any progress on de-nuclearization and it wasn't likely to.

North Korea has achieved most of what it wanted just getting treated as an equal giving it great propaganda at home.

While clearly it would be in the country's best interest to agree to de-nuclearize in exchange for an end of sanctions, the dictator is only interested in his own grasp on power.

Opening up the country to outside influences isn't likely to help in that respect, what does help is his propaganda showing him standing up to the Americans.

As much as his people are deprived of many things we take for granted, they aren't generally aware of how much worse off they are, and seeing their leader on the World Stage gives them a sense of patriotism.

Our president has a similar motivation, but it should be obvious by now that he is generally outclassed by most people he deals with.

One could argue whether this was predictable based on his somewhat spotty career as a developer and business man.

He did at times make deals and in a few instances the deals worked out.  However he didn't build an empire our of nothing, he started with a significant base and pretty early on played the publicity game making his name a bit of a commodity that has been worth a fair amount.

His goal of getting North Korea to denuclearize is not actually achievable and his belief that suspending testing is a great victory is questionable, since they might not need more testing to get what they were aiming for.

Still, as predictable as this outcome was, it was probably worth a try.

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