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North Korea has told the U.S. that Kim Jong Un is prepared to discuss the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, clearing the way for a summit meeting between the North Korean leader and President Donald Trump, according to U.S. officials.

U.S. officials didn’t say when and how that assurance was delivered, but U.S. and North Korean officials have been in communication.

“The U.S. has confirmed that Kim Jong Un is willing to discuss the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” a Trump administration official said on Sunday.

Hopes for a breakthrough that might end more than six decades of animosity on the Korean Peninsula were raised last month when South Korean national security adviser, Chung Eui-yong, told the White House that North Korea was prepared to engage in talks on denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula and would refrain from nuclear and missile tests.

For weeks, however, U.S. officials heard nothing from the North Koreans, raising concerns that the South Korean government, which is eager to reduce tensions on the peninsula, might have exaggerated Pyongyang’s willingness to put its nuclear arsenal on the negotiating table.

The North Korean assurance doesn’t mean that talks will necessarily succeed. Pyongyang has indicated that progress toward denuclearization should proceed in phases that are synchronized with diplomatic and economic concessions from the U.S. side.

It is possible that North Korea’s timetable for reducing and ultimately eliminating its arsenal might be far longer than the Trump administration would be prepared to accept. The North, for example, may define denuclearization as a long-term goal that would only be achieved if the U.S. eliminated the potential military threat to its regime by withdrawing forces from South Korea.

North Korea also might ask for more concessions than Washington is willing to provide. Working out verification arrangements to confirm that North Korea isn’t hiding weapons could be an additional stumbling block.

“Kim Jong Un being willing to discuss denuclearization is a good development given that in the past he has said that denuclearization was not possible,” said Joseph DeTrani, who served as the U.S. special envoy to the so-called Six Party talks on North Korea’s nuclear program from 2003 to 2006. The talks included the U.S., North Korea, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia.

“We now have to discuss whether his definition of denuclearization is similar to ours, which is complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement of all of their nuclear weapons and weapons programs,” said Mr. DeTrani.

North Korea has previously committed itself to denuclearization. A September 2005 statement issued during the Six Party talks noted that Pyongyang was “committed to abandoning all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs.” That statement also said that steps toward denuclearization would be taken “in a phased manner” and based on the reciprocal principle of ”action for action.” CONTINUE AT SITE

President Trump said something this week that flew largely under the radar of a media obsessed with Stormy Daniels and whether it can get the scalp of “embattled” (by them) EPA boss, Scott Pruitt. It had to do with the ongoing conflict in the Middle East and what, if any, America’s long-term role should be in that sorry corner of the world. He said that our troops would be withdrawing “very soon” from Syria, no later than this autumn.

The reaction from the proponents of endless war was illustrative of why, going on 17 years after 9/11, America still finds itself embroiled in Muslim-bred conflicts in which it has no material interest other than strictly punitive. As the Washington Post reported:

President Trump’s pronouncement that he would be pulling troops out of Syria “very soon” has laid bare a major source of tension between the president and his generals. Trump has made winning on the battlefields of Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan a central tenet of his foreign policy and tough-guy identity. But Trump and the military hold frequently opposing ideas about exactly what winning means.

Those differences have played out in heated Situation Room ­debates over virtually every spot on the globe where U.S. troops are engaged in combat, said senior administration officials. And they contributed to the dismissal last month of Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster who as national security adviser had pressed the president against his instincts to support an ­open-ended commitment of U.S. forces to Afghanistan.

No wonder McMaster is gone. An “open-ended commitment” of U.S. forces to anywhere, much less the notional “country” of Afghanistan, is one of the worst ideas ever and runs counter to American policy since the days of George Washington. But the enthusiasm for it among the careerist military and the consensus-loving bureaucrats of the State Department remains unabated.

It’s apparently not enough that we’ve been fighting the same collection of goatherds with AK-47s since early in the first term of the George W. Bush Administration. It’s bad enough that we didn’t finish the job—which was to take Osama bin Laden at his word, and at his declaration of war upon us in the name of Islam—and deal the expansionist, triumphalist faith a blow from which it might never recover. The Saudis, in the form of the bin Laden family and most of the 9/11 hijackers, had given us a casus belli, as had the Iranians, dating all the way back to the hostage crisis of the Carter Administration, and for which they have never been properly disciplined. All right-thinking allies would have been behind us.

But of course, we didn’t. The war in Afghanistan was effectively over in a matter of a few months, although bin Laden escaped to next-door Pakistan, where the duplicitous Pakistanis—whose countrymen are currently visiting a rape epidemic upon poor, politically correct Britain—gave him shelter right under the noses of their military establishment. Then Bush chose to turn his attention to Poppy’s unfinished spat with Saddam Hussein. And here we are, nearly two decades later, still taking off our shoes to get on an airplane in our own country, and with troops scattered all across the Middle East for no purpose.

When Liu He, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s top economic adviser, came to Washington in late February, he was expected to make arrangements for restarting trade talks that President Donald Trump had put on ice.

But just as Liu arrived, the Trump administration announced global steel and aluminum tariffs aimed at punishing China for what Washington says is its overproduction of steel that hurts U.S. steel makers. The announcement came a day ahead of a meeting planned with Trump’s economic point men, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and then White House adviser Gary Cohn.

Pessimistic Trump officials had said the Liu meeting would probably go nowhere. “People expect that whatever the Chinese offer it will be insufficient,” a White House official told Reuters just hours ahead of the meeting.

The timing of the announcement, whether deliberately aimed at embarrassing Liu or not, was emblematic of the Trump administration’s more confrontational approach to what the United States has long viewed as China’s unfair trade practices.

It was the opening salvo in a pattern of escalation that continued this week as Trump slapped first $50 billion in tariffs on China and then said he would seek $100 billion more after Beijing struck back.

The rapid tit-for-tat escalation, which has brought the world’s two biggest economies to the edge of a trade war, is being driven by anti-China economist Peter Navarro and U.S trade negotiator Robert Lighthizer, who cut his teeth in trade deals with Japan in the 1980s.

The U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in 2016 sent $9 million in U.S. taxpayer funds to a Soros-backed group which used the money to fund far-left political activities in Albania, newly released documents show.
Judicial Watch
✔ @JudicialWatch
Important Judicial Watch obtained docs revealing the Obama Admin sent U.S. taxpayer funds overseas to a group backed by billionaire George Soros – which used the money to fund left-wing political activities benefiting the socialist government in Albania.http://jwatch.us/aWfFnm
According to Judicial Watch, which obtained the 32 pages of records through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, the American tax dollars were used to help the country’s socialist government push for highly controversial judicial “reform.” The records also provide insight into how the Soros operation “helped the State Department review grant applications from other groups for taxpayer funding. CONTINUE AT SITE

The proverbial knot of Gordium was impossible to untie. Anyone clever enough to untie it would supposedly become the king of Asia. Many princes tried; all failed.

When Alexander the Great arrived, he was challenged to unravel the impossible knot. Instead, he pulled out his sword and cut through it. Problem solved.

Donald Trump inherited an array of perennial crises when he was sworn in as president in 2017. He certainly did not possess the traditional diplomatic skills and temperament to deal with any of them.

In the last year of the Barack Obama Administration, a lunatic North Korean regime purportedly had gained the ability to send nuclear-tipped missiles to the U.S. West Coast.

China had not only been violating trade agreements but forcing U.S. companies to hand over their technological expertise as the price of doing business in China.

NATO may have been born to protect the European mainland, but a distant United States was paying an increasingly greater percentage of its budget to maintain NATO than were its direct beneficiaries.

Mexico keeps sending its impoverished citizens to the United States, and they usually enter illegally. That way, Mexico relieves its own social tensions, develops a pro-Mexico expatriate community in the U.S. and gains an estimated $30 billion a year from remittances that undocumented immigrants send back home, often on the premise that American social services can free up cash for them to do so.

In the past, traditional and accepted methods failed to deal with all of these challenges. Bill Clinton’s “Agreed Framework,” George W. Bush’s “six-party talks” and the “strategic patience” of the Obama administration essentially offered North Korea cash to denuclearize.

Should American personnel be removed from Syria, President Erdogan will be able to use his tanks and airplanes to revive the Turkish genocidal tradition by expelling the Syrian Kurds from their towns and villages along the entire border with Turkey. These are the same Kurds — remember Kobani? — who drove out ISIS from its Syrian “caliphate” and enabled other Syrians to regain their freedom and return to their own homes.

In early February, the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman begged Turkey to cease its assault on Afrin, claiming — truly enough — that “the continuation of Turkey’s military operation will facilitate the return of instability and terrorism to Syria.” Indeed, deprived of American protection, the Kurds will hardly find anyone else willing to rescue them apart from Iran. If that happens, the Kurds will reward Iranians with same loyalty and devotion that they showed hitherto to Americans. Understandably, since they will owe their lives and homes to Iran, not to the United States.

Even if the implications of the massacre in Afrin were not so clearly evident, President Trump should remember the worst mistake of Obama’s presidency in the area. This was Obama’s precipitous and petulant decision to withdraw residual American military forces from Iraq. So, Mr. Trump, we beg and urge you not to copy Obama, who made his big mistake and reversed it, but to reverse your mistake before you make it.

The terrified dire warnings that greeted Donald Trump’s election to the presidency of the United States have proved to be mostly exaggerated or imaginary. In some cases, like his decision to terminate absurd diplomatic antics about the location of Israel’s capital, he has put an end to nonsense perpetrated by politicians throughout the world, including all recent American presidents. Very sadly, extremely sadly, he now seems inclined to repeat the worst mistake of his predecessor, President Obama.

WASHINGTON — Two GOP senators urged President Trump in a letter today to sell new F-35s to Taiwan “as a necessary deterrent to China’s aggressive military posture across the Asia-Pacific region.”

Trump began his presidency by taking a call from Taiwan’s president that infuriated China, but has drawn closer to the “very special man,” as he calls Chinese President Xi Jinping, throughout his term — his tariffs announcement last week notwithstanding.

The administration’s Taiwan policy has been hazy, prompting Congress to try to push Trump to support the island over the PRC.

Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) wrote to Trump that the administration should “commit to providing new, U.S. made fighters to aid in Taiwan’s self-defense.”

“Since the early 1950s, the United States has promoted peace by ensuring that Taiwan has the means to defend itself. The 1979 Taiwan Relations Act (TRA), states that the US should ‘maintain the capacity of the United States to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security, or the social or economic system, of the people on Taiwan,’ which codifies the U.S. policy of robust support for Taiwan’s self-defense into law,” the senators noted.

“After years of military modernization, China shows the ability to wage war against Taiwan for the first time since the 1950s,” they added. “However, with your leadership, it is possible to help Taiwan remain a democracy, free to establish a relationship with China that is not driven by military coercion. Taiwan has a legitimate requirement to field a modern fighter fleet to address a myriad of defense contingencies. Therefore, Taiwan is requesting U.S. support in their procurement of the F-35B.”

The U.S. sold 150 F-16s to Taiwan in 1993, and the island currently has approximately 144 F-16 fighters in its inventory. Cornyn and Inhofe noted that “15 are in the U.S. for training, and an additional 24 will be offline on a rolling basis in their ongoing upgrade program that runs through 2023,” so “at a reasonable operational rate, Taiwan is likely able to field only 65 F-16s at any given time in defense of the island… not enough to maintain a credible defense.”

Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen wants to buy the F-35B vertical take-off and landing aircraft to bolster Taiwan’s air defense. CONTINUE AT SITE

Boy, I hope President Trump doesn’t charge tariffs on Chinese products to the U.S. That may cause China to retaliate. They may start charging tariffs on U.S. goods. That seems to be the story line we are getting, not everywhere, but in most of the press overall. It’s as if China isn’t already charging tariffs on a wide range of products.

The way the media reports Trump’s trade policy is to suggest that he is stupid and is going to destroy the economy if he imposes mirror tariffs on Chinese goods. Yet at the same time, many suggest that existing polices are great.

It would be helpful if news organizations listed some existing tariffs on U.S products being exported to China.

I looked up cars, car parts, computers and grains, and they all have significant tariffs or taxes already. (Nothing I looked up did not have a tariff or tax.)

Here is what I found.

Manufactured in Toledo, Ohio, the Wrangler is a descendant of the jeeps that were used by American forces in World War II. Equipped with a 3.6-liter engine and a five-speed automatic transmission, the Rubicon edition of the Wrangler has a suggested retail price of $40,530 in the United States.

But in China, the same vehicle would set a buyer back by a hefty $71,000, mostly because of taxes that Beijing charges on every car, minivan and sport utility vehicle that is made in another country and brought to China’s shores.
Chinese rules on taxes for the import of auto parts impose 15% charge (on top of the 10% customs duty) on imported car parts when they are destined to a
model that fulfils the “characteristics of a whole vehicle.”

The buzz about President Trump’s possible meeting with North Korean strongman Kim Jong-un has been followed by the usual Trumpophobe disdain matched by Trumpophile enthusiasm. But if this recent talk of an unprecedented presidential face-to-face negotiation with Kim turns into a reality, don’t expect much other than photo-ops and diplomatic clichés like “progress” and “productive,” with nothing meaningful accomplished. The Kim dynasty has been playing this game for three generations, and have become masters of exploiting the West’s diplomatic magical thinking that talk alone can stop a determined aggressor.

We know that Trump considers himself a master negotiator, eager to solve intractable foreign policy conflicts. Getting the Norks to denuclearize would be “the greatest deal in the world,” as the president said, something he reminds us his three predecessors could not accomplish. Perhaps the time is ripe. Kim may be feeling pressure from economic sanctions, especially since China has supported U.N. sanctions on their regional pit-bull. Or maybe Kim takes seriously Trump’s “fire and fury” threats, considering that the unconventional Trump may be a Nixonian “crazy” man who just might act on his bluster.

But as a perusal of the history compiled by the Arms Control Association shows, the canny Kims have survived over three decades of sanctions and saber-rattling rhetoric, participated in numerous negotiations and summits, and signed a plethora of agreements they have serially violated. Their aim has been clear throughout: possession of nuclear weapons that can be delivered on missiles capable of reaching the U.S. The vague “concessions” and “concrete actions” expected of the North before talks can begin, not to mention the suggested goal of the talks that North Korea gives up its nuclear weapons, are highly unlikely to be forthcoming.