5-1-18
Trump needs to study up on North Korea's history of duplicity
Rounduptags: nuclear weapons, North Korea, Kim Jong Un, nuclear war, Trump
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. ...
comments powered by Disqus
News
- Josh Hawley Earns F in Early American History
- Does Germany's Holocaust Education Give Cover to Nativism?
- "Car Brain" Has Long Normalized Carnage on the Roads
- Hawley's Use of Fake Patrick Henry Quote a Revealing Error
- Health Researchers Show Segregation 100 Years Ago Harmed Black Health, and Effects Continue Today
- Nelson Lichtenstein on a Half Century of Labor History
- Can America Handle a 250th Anniversary?
- New Research Shows British Industrialization Drew Ironworking Methods from Colonized and Enslaved Jamaicans
- The American Revolution Remains a Hotly Contested Symbolic Field
- Untangling Fact and Fiction in the Story of a Nazi-Era Brothel