Trump needs to study up on North Korea's history of duplicity

Before meeting with North Korea’s “very honorable” (Trump’s words) dictator, Kim Jong Un, the president should bone up on the history of that country’s duplicity and deception, including ways it has used the wishful thinking of some past U.S. presidents to achieve its objectives.

A good place to start is an essay written by Joshua Muravchik of the American Enterprise Institute for the March 2003 issue of Commentary magazine.

As Muravchik notes, North Korea’s nuclear program isn’t a recent development. It began in 1979 and since then, its leaders have played the West, and especially the U.S., like a Stradivarius.

In 1989, Pyongyang claimed it would agree that the entire Korean Peninsula become a nuclear-free zone (sound familiar?). Instead, after raising hopes in the George H.W. Bush administration, it began requiring conditions and incredibly won concession after concession, sending a message that the U.S. could be had.

In January 1992, North and South Korea reached an agreement to prohibit nuclear weapons from the peninsula, but North Korea refused to sign a “safeguards” agreement, and then said it would have to submit the deal to its legislature, a process that would deliberately take several months. More agreements, re-designations of nuclear plants into something they were not and more deception followed. ...