A beautiful letter here, a beautiful letter there
Oh I misunderstood what Trump said about Kim’s murder of his brother – it wasn’t that he would do the same thing in Kim’s position, it was that he wouldn’t let the CIA spy on North Korea.
Soooooo that’s horrifying. Here we are, wishing Trump had merely endorsed a murder.
David Graham at the Atlantic cleared it up for me.
Two accounts, a new book by the Washington Post reporter Anna Fifield and a Wall Street Journal story, report that Kim’s brother Kim Jong Nam was a CIA informant. Kim Jong Nam was killed in a shocking chemical-weapons attack in the Kuala Lumpur airport in February 2017. Trump was asked about the revelation as he left the White House for a trip to Iowa, and his answer was jarring.
“I see that, and I just received a beautiful letter from Kim Jong Un,” Trump said. “I think the relationship is very well, but I appreciated the letter. I saw the information about the CIA with regard to his brother or half brother, and I would tell him that would not happen under my auspices. I wouldn’t let that happen under my auspices. I just received a beautiful letter from Kim Jong Un.”
I thought he meant “if I had a brother who was spying on me I’d murder him in a New York minute.” Is he now going to tell the CIA to stop gathering intel on Kim?
American officials often avoid discussing sensitive stories like this with the press, and one reason for that caution became clear as Trump continued. The context of his remarks makes clear that what Trump “wouldn’t let … happen” is not Kim Jong Nam’s killing, but his cultivation as an American asset. Trump has said that former President Barack Obama described North Korea as the nation’s greatest foreign-policy challenge, and Trump has taken that cue, making it a major priority. By saying he wouldn’t allow American intelligence to cultivate an asset so close to Kim, he’s saying he wouldn’t use spying to better understand the country’s biggest overseas challenge.
Put another way, he’s ruling out having the best information possible headed into high-stakes negotiations. Tying one hand behind your back like this makes sense only if you have a messianic belief in your own negotiating prowess—which Trump does, despite the collapse of the most recent round of talks.
Or if you’re so engorged with gratified vanity that you think the North Korean dictator really does love you and deserves all your best favors.
The guiding principle of Trump’s interactions with Kim has been to try to flatter Kim’s ego and play the good cop, while allowing other members of his administration to take the hard line. Arguably, that paid off in getting Kim to negotiate, even though no deal has been struck. But it also risks letting Kim get away with heinous acts, because the risk of offending him is that negotiations will break off. Moreover, this incident shows it works both ways: Kim grasps the importance of flattering Trump, as with the “beautiful” letter he sent the president. A beautiful letter here, a beautiful letter there, and pretty soon the president of the United States is apologizing to you after a report that you killed an American informant.
Trump is a cheap date.
I thought February 2017 would have been under his auspices.
I disagree that the context of his remarks makes it clear what he meant. Nothing is clear about his remarks, context or not. I think it’s possible he was saying he wouldn’t spy, but he sort of seems to have some bravado in his voice as he says it, which makes me think maybe he is saying he would have stopped the murder (if only it had been under his auspices!). Who knows.
Well, that’s one way of putting it, I suppose. But Kim Jong Un’s Pyongyang regime makes Stalin’s Kremlin look like a bunch of hippies preaching flower-power.
Both Trump and the murderous Kim believe they each have the other’s measure, and so games can be safely played. One of them has to be wrong. But which one?
Too early to tell. But the choreographed mass tributes to the glory of Kim in Pyongyang must be a nightmare for the producers and stage managers. One foot wrong, and someone has to be purged and totally eliminated.
KIm’s own private nightmare must be that he will eventually go the way Ceaucescu of Romania (and his wife) went.. The masses can be deceptive: en masse.
Every day in every way Trump shows us what a terrible negotiator he is. Time and again he’s allowed his opponents to set the terms of negotiations and for them to be contingent on things entirely under their control. Everyone else on the planet knows that this is the cardinal thing to avoid in any negotiation. You have to set up and maintain an environment of “if you do right by us, we’ll do right by you” or you’ve already lost.
I agree with Skeletor that Trump’s meaning (as so often) is far from ‘clear’.
When I first read the transcript I thought that either he was saying he’d kill his brother too or that he wouldn’t have let his brother spy on him in the first place.
This third candidate meaning didn’t occur to me at all until it was pointed out that it is clear from context. Now I just have three meanings I can’t decide between and watching Trump say the words doesn’t give me any clues. Also, it made me sick in my mouth a bit.
I guess we should be happy that in subatomic physics that Mr. Schrodinger only offered us two choices of cat-state and not more. The collapse of this wave function is not going to be pretty.
Don’t think too long on what it must have happened to your brain, then…. There is no minimum safe dosage.
It’s bad enough seeing him with the sound off, yelling for someone to turn his hair over ’cause that side’s done. Are there hazmat suits for one’s mind? Or, barring that, any known decontamination proceedure that can deal with the effects of even short term exposure like this?
There would be a lot more than two states if someone put my cat in a box. Almost all of them would involve blood.
Trump isn’t a date, he’s the broken overflowing dumpster behind the dive bar frequented by junkies where roaches go to die.
@Kristjan:
How did you get my address?
not Bruce:
I once thought it was only a grim joke to say that Kim Jong Un could get far and curry favor with Trump through simple flattery. How wrong I was to see that as a joke in any degree.
Should you find yourself a monstrous dictator with a long list of deaths, abuses, and outrages to your credit, don’t worry. You only need to speak well of the toddler Trump — tell him his golf game is strong, or that his business sense is strong, just use the word “strong” a lot — and The World’s Greatest Superpower will bless and keep you.
Omar @2,
I think you’re incorrectly assuming a zero-sum game with two players. I think the reality is that there are three perspectives: (1) Kim’s interests; (2) Trump’s personal interests; and (3) the national interest of the U.S. Well, technically, there’s a 4th for “the national interest of North Korea,” but we take it for granted that it gets no weight to the extent it differs from Kim’s personal interests.
(2) is supposed to be subservient to (3) in a democratic system, but that’s another thing to fall by the wayside in the Trump era. I think that Kim and Trump are implicitly colluding. Kim gets to proceed with his weapons programs for the very low price of occasionally writing a nice letter to Trump and pretending to make some concessions that don’t actually do anything, and as a nice bonus gets the occasional summit where he is treated as an equal and friend of the American president. Trump gets to keep North Korea as a threat that only Trump’s personal diplomacy can keep in line. “Only I can fix it.” He’s doing so by selling out America’s long-term interest in containing North Korea’s weapons programs, but hey, apres moi le deluge.
Screechy – and the fact that we have no idea where Putin might fit into everything…
Screechy & iknklast:
It has long been a contention of mine that as humans and primates, the one domain of life that evolution has not prepared us for is the exercise of power. The pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer band was/is made up of up to around 50 individuals who any one member of it knew very well, and births, deaths and exogamous marriages were all that slowly changed it. More than ~50 and the group would split.
Agriculture in the 12,000 years or so since the glaciers retreated brought villages, then towns, then cities, empires and all the rest of it. So now a Stalin in Moscow can snap his fingers and close to half-way round the globe some poor undeserving (or at the outer edge of probability, deserving) bastard dies. Putin has to be a bit more circumspect and devious: (eg Litvinenko’s murder).
Hence Lord Acton’s famous dictum: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Kim Jong Un would have been told from birth that he was born to rule. In Trump’s case, he had to work that one out for himself. Which he has apparently been quite successful at; and it is probably all his own concentrated thought that done it. Along with discovering that the Moon is part of Mars. (Or should that be the other way around?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvinenko
Omar, I have been maintaining for a long time that large, populous countries are simply not suited for democracy because of just those very things. To make a democracy work, you have to know (and give a damn about) your fellow citizens. That can be possible in some places for a limited length of time, but if you get too far from each other, you will end up with Brexit or Fascism or Trump.
The problem is, with 7.6 billion people in the world, many breathing down each others throats, it isn’t feasible to break into bands of 50 to 100 for governance, because the intertribal relationships would be too complex and trade/territorial issues would probably be unmanageable.
In other words, I think we’re screwed.
iknklast, you might be interested in the theories of Murray Bookchin, if you ave not already encountered them.
Wealth and power generally go together, and that in and of itself is antidemocratic. But then, Catch-22, organising for resistance and protection brings its own problems, because organisations tend to become oligarchic.
I do not think we are screwed. The hard part, as Darwin noted in another context, is identifying the questions. Once that is done, the answers are pretty easy.
But there are limits to growth in a finite world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Bookchin
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number