Thanks as always to Pirate’s Cove and The Other McCain for the Rule Five links!
If this particular piece of President Trump’s foreign policy works as it seems to be doing, this will be (literally) world changing. Excerpt:
In a historic summit more striking for its extraordinary images than its substance, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in set aside a year that saw them seemingly on the verge of war, grasped hands and strode together Friday across the cracked concrete marking the Koreas’ border.
The sight, inconceivable just months ago, may not erase their failure to provide any new measures on a nuclear standoff that has captivated and terrified millions, but it allowed the leaders to step forward toward the possibility of a cooperative future even as they acknowledged a fraught past and the widespread skepticism that, after decades of failed diplomacy, things will be any different this time.
On the nuclear issue, the leaders merely repeated a previous vow to rid the Korean Peninsula of nuclear weapons, kicking one of the world’s most pressing issues down the road to a much-anticipated summit between Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump in coming weeks.
Still, the summit produced the spectacle of two men from nations with a deep and bitter history of acrimony grinning from ear to ear after Kim walked over the border to greet Moon, becoming the first leader of his nation to set foot on southern soil since the Korean War. Both leaders then briefly stepped together into the North and back to the South.
Mind you this is all style and little substance at the moment. Still, the possibilities are huge: peace on the Korean peninsula for the first time since 1950? That’s a pretty damn big deal.
One wonders how much of this is due to President Trump pressuring China (trade deals) and China leaning on their client state, that paranoid Stalinist regime led by a stunted little gargoyle with bad hair from a long line of stunted little gargoyles with bad hair. If the Koreas make some kind of peace, no doubt the details will come out.
Senator Graham is making noises about the President being a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize if this goes through, although that award means little these days. A “Peace” prize awarded to the loathsome terrorist Yassir Arafat for who knows what reason, and again to Barack Obama for, apparently, existing, has been denatured a great deal since Teddy Roosevelt was awarded one for negotiating the end to the Russo-Japanese War – another nasty conflict in this general part of the world.
We’ll see.
