On 1/16/2018 at 11:10 AM, southsider2k5 said:

A good history of the NK program through the last couple of decades, including all of the times they have been cheating on agreements over the years.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/world/as...telligence.html

 

 

Also fair to rebump this for a much better read on the history of our deals with NK through the dictators.

Why is Kim Jong Un suddenly acting like he wants peace, etc? Let's just for a moment assume this is all a farce and he will continue testing nukes and has ulterior motives. What are they? What would those be? Would it be easier to take over South Korea by opening the borders, etc? Once things appear peaceful, boom, he takes over the 2 countries?

Maybe the unpredictability on our side helped push him into it? Maybe him having completed his nuclear program has helped put him on equal footing? There's a variety of explanations, but do remember that his number one goal is to stay in power. To this point, he's being treated like an equal and hasn't really conceded anything, which is what he wants.

Good post Heads. 

On 5/2/2018 at 11:12 AM, greg775 said:

Why is Kim Jong Un suddenly acting like he wants peace, etc? Let's just for a moment assume this is all a farce and he will continue testing nukes and has ulterior motives. What are they? What would those be? Would it be easier to take over South Korea by opening the borders, etc? Once things appear peaceful, boom, he takes over the 2 countries?

This is what needs to be talked about.  You can be damn sure the brains of Washington are all over this scenario.  

 

I can’t imagine sanctions are driving this.    I’m wondering if there is some back room agreement among some Asian nations driving this, including maybe Russia.  The end goal possibly being the demilitarization of the area by the Americans?  I dunno.  

 

This isn’t the grinch growing a bigger heart, and there isn’t some extreme pressure on Kim forcing this.  

 

I’d love to hear speculations, crazy ones welcome. 

6 hours ago, Jerksticks said:

This is what needs to be talked about.  You can be damn sure the brains of Washington are all over this scenario.  

 

I can’t imagine sanctions are driving this.    I’m wondering if there is some back room agreement among some Asian nations driving this, including maybe Russia.  The end goal possibly being the demilitarization of the area by the Americans?  I dunno.  

 

This isn’t the grinch growing a bigger heart, and there isn’t some extreme pressure on Kim forcing this.  

 

I’d love to hear speculations, crazy ones welcome. 

The last 2 North Korean leaders would have accepted exactly what we've seen so far in exchange for what we've given them - a meeting with no preconditions with the US Leader. They'd have gone to this point any time in the last 25 years if the US leadership was willing. They put more on the table than that for Clinton, including a wide range of inspections of their facilities, with the hopes of getting a meeting with him directly. 

The 2 things that were important - When they were negotiating with Clinton they were in fact cheating on that deal by importing material from Pakistan that could, eventually, have led to development of a Uranium cascade system that could be weaponized (it never was, and all of their bombs have come from the plutonium stockpile that Clinton was trying to get sealed off and removed from Korea). And secondly, in 2001, we declared that negotiation with bad people was something we would not do without them meeting the full set of our requests as preconditions. 

Barack Obama would have been savaged as a traitor if he had agreed to a meeting with Kim with no preconditions, regardless of the circumstances, because that was the standard we adopted under GWB. The Koreans would have accepted negotiations without preconditions if offered. Donald Trump is able to do that. 

The outlines of a deal have been there for 25 years: aid, money, and a guarantee of regime stability to protect themselves from a US invasion. The question is whether they'd actually give up their weapons to accomplish that and whether we can trust that they won't cheat on any agreement we make.

In the case of the Iran deal, the latter issue was dealt with by making sure that there were intrusive, non-aligned IAEA inspections of all facilities crafted by skilled negotiators at the State Department and UN. I'm not sure the State Department is capable of constructing such requirements right now.

Don't just pull out, that's what she said, but goes on TV and starts throwing threats. So presidential.

2 minutes ago, Rabbit said:

What happened now? I saw the three US citizens in NK got released. Who got the threats?

Were 2 of those the ones that Obama couldn't get released even though they were captured after Trump took over.

12 minutes ago, Rabbit said:

What happened now? I saw the three US citizens in NK got released. Who got the threats?

I'm talking about his speech last night and I posted it in the wrong thread. Oops. E-Brian

On 5/2/2018 at 11:12 AM, greg775 said:

Why is Kim Jong Un suddenly acting like he wants peace, etc? Let's just for a moment assume this is all a farce and he will continue testing nukes and has ulterior motives. What are they? What would those be? Would it be easier to take over South Korea by opening the borders, etc? Once things appear peaceful, boom, he takes over the 2 countries?

Trump being a fellow bully who knew to call out the other bully's bluffs is part of it, so he gets credit there. But I remain convinced the main reason is that NK lost their test facility, some scientists and years of progress when they blew up the mountain and buried their work. KJU knows this, and thus now is the perfect time to pretend he wants peace. He gets to stall a awhile, get some more goodies, then he can decide whether to stick to it or go back for more nuke work.

I am sincerely concerned TrumpCo isn't taking that testing facility aspect seriously. I am sure CIA knows, but I don't think Trump would want to hear it, because that would mean it wasn't all his doing.

 

3 hours ago, NorthSideSox72 said:

Trump being a fellow bully who knew to call out the other bully's bluffs is part of it, so he gets credit there. But I remain convinced the main reason is that NK lost their test facility, some scientists and years of progress when they blew up the mountain and buried their work. KJU knows this, and thus now is the perfect time to pretend he wants peace. He gets to stall a awhile, get some more goodies, then he can decide whether to stick to it or go back for more nuke work.

I am sincerely concerned TrumpCo isn't taking that testing facility aspect seriously. I am sure CIA knows, but I don't think Trump would want to hear it, because that would mean it wasn't all his doing.

 

Did the U.S. blow up the mountain? I missed that one. Pretty cool if we actually damaged their progress toward nuclear engagement. It was kind of scary those weeks when the nutjob was threatening to send some missiles to our mainland and Hawaii.

They blew the mountain up themselves via repeated nuclear testing.

On 5/11/2018 at 8:29 PM, greg775 said:

Did the U.S. blow up the mountain? I missed that one. Pretty cool if we actually damaged their progress toward nuclear engagement. It was kind of scary those weeks when the nutjob was threatening to send some missiles to our mainland and Hawaii.

As SS said, NK did it themselves. Too many nuclear tests with apparently poor planning or safety protocols, and they basically collapsed the side of a mountain, probably destroying much of their test facility.

 

 

 

Trump and Bolton spurn top-level North Korea planning

After two months on the job, Trump’s new national security adviser has not called a single top-level National Security Council meeting on North Korea.

 

National Security Adviser John Bolton has yet to convene a Cabinet-level meeting to discuss President Donald Trump’s upcoming summit with North Korea next week, a striking break from past practice that suggests the Trump White House is largely improvising its approach to the unprecedented nuclear talks.

For decades, top presidential advisers have used a methodical process to hash out national security issues before offering the president a menu of options for key decisions. On an issue like North Korea, that would mean White House Situation Room gatherings of the secretaries of state and defense along with top intelligence officials, the United Nations ambassador, and even the treasury secretary, who oversees economic sanctions.

 

But since Trump agreed on a whim to meet with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un on March 8, the White House’s summit planning has been unstructured, according to a half-dozen administration officials. Trump himself has driven the preparation almost exclusively on his own, consulting little with his national security team outside of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Senior officials from both the Barack Obama and George W. Bush administrations called the absence of a formal interagency process before such a consequential meeting troubling. Peter Feaver, a former National Security Council (NSC) official in the George W. Bush White House, said his colleagues would likely have held "quite a few" meetings of the so-called Principals Committee of Cabinet-level NSC members in a comparable situation. A former top Obama White House official echoed that point, calling the lack of top-level NSC meetings “shocking.”

 

mroe: https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/07/trump-bolton-north-korea-630362

Whoever had Dennis Rodman and Donald Trump in the Make Peace with North Korea pool, please collect your winnings at the window.

8 minutes ago, LittleHurt05 said:

Whoever had Dennis Rodman and Donald Trump in the Make Peace with North Korea pool, please collect your winnings at the window.

Don’t forget Bolton, Pompeo, Kelly and some Haagen Dazs ice cream....first, it was the “immaculate” chocolate cake served at Mar A Lago for Abe and Xi Jinping, now more dessert-bonding.

I watched the press conference Tuesday afternoon live from Singapore and, of course, he had to make a comment about beaches and prime North Korean real estate and how perfectly it was situated between China and South Korea/Japan.  It was hard for him to stop gloating, or criticizing Obama, even though the actual agreement signed today is about as thin as a razor in terms of actual, concrete details/agreements.

Edited June 12, 20187 yr by caulfield12

Lol

 

 

 

Trump NK Golf club would be sweet. The 2 dictators could play a round. It would last about 5 minutes with all the holes in one.

They've signed this before.  They will walk it all back.  We legitimized kim and gave up our standing on the world stage.  Fantastic work.

 

 

good lord

 

 

 

 

e: the good outcome of these talks so far is that Trump and Kim are now best friends, which has to decrease the likelihood of war breaking out.

Edited June 12, 20187 yr by StrangeSox

I'm still curious about the sudden shift in Kim's thinking. Was he starting to lose power at home? Were Trump's threats taken seriously? Is this just a long con?

What shift? He just got a lot of what he wanted while not really giving up or committing to anything.

2 minutes ago, Jenksismyhero said:

I'm still curious about the sudden shift in Kim's thinking. Was he starting to lose power at home? Were Trump's threats taken seriously? Is this just a long con?

I think his test site was messed up so he couldn't use it, so he figured he might as well play nice for a while., and get stuff for nothing.

 

Hotels in NK? Kim will be long gone before that could be a tourist attraction.

Edited June 12, 20187 yr by Dick Allen