FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The Trump-Kim Summit: What Lies Ahead Why President Trump has plenty of reason for optimism. Joseph Klein

Posted By on June 13th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270441/trump-kim-summit-what-lies-ahead-joseph-klein

North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and President Trump shook hands for the cameras in front of a row of alternating U.S. and North Korean flags, as they began their historic summit meeting in Singapore shortly after 9 am local time on June 12, 2018. President Trump told reporters in brief remarks before the start of an approximately 40-minute one-on-one meeting, with just translators present, that he “felt really great” and that it was “an honor” to meet Kim Jong-un. “We’re going to have a great discussion,” Trump said. “We will have a great relationship.” Kim Jong-un declared, “Well, it was not easy to get here. The past worked as fetters on our limbs, and the old prejudices and practices worked as obstacles on our way forward. But we overcame all of them, and we are here today.”

Following their private meeting, the two leaders walked to a larger room to be joined by their respective advisers, and then attended a working lunch. The historic summit concluded after about five hours with a joint statement in which President Trump “committed to provide security guarantees to the DPRK [the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea], and Chairman Kim Jong Un reaffirmed his firm and unwavering commitment to complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”

The joint statement described the summit as “an epochal event of great significance in overcoming decades of tensions and hostilities between the two countries and for the opening up of a new future.” The two leaders agreed to “follow-on negotiations, led by the U.S. Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, and a relevant high-level DPRK official, at the earliest possible date, to implement the outcomes of the U.S.–DPRK summit.” More summit meetings may be in the offing.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Terrorist Time Bombs in the Making By Eileen F. Toplansky

Posted By on June 13th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/terrorist_time_bombs_in_the_making.html

One of the most despicable things that the Arab world does to its children is to turn them into human bombs. Propaganda in the form of songs is regularly broadcast on the Palestinian radio, The Voice of Palestine, as well as the Fatah-run TV station Awdah.

The song’s lyrics are as follows:

Our Martyrs are convoys and our bones are mountains
They don’t surrender to the lowly
We aren’t deterred by imprisonment
Palestine is etched on the heart of the fetus
A proud Martyr in his mother’s womb
And the Arab state will remain ours – Arab, Arab Palestine
We [hold] the rifles to our chests and our eyes are raised to you
Our homes are trenches and our souls are the sacrifice for you O Jerusalem, you will not remain stolen.

– “The First Direction of Prayer” by Syrian singer Assala Nasri
Official P.A. radio station The Voice of Palestine, Feb. 3, 2018

Innocent Arab children are being brought into this world for the explicit purpose of becoming killing machines. Are there any words to describe this despicable madness?

Since 1996, the Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) has been highlighting the heinous propaganda tools used in the Muslim world to “seek martyrdom-death.”

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The Key to Trump’s Success in North Korea By Karin McQuillan

Posted By on June 13th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/the_key_to_trumps_success_in_north_korea.html

Who would have thought a real estate developer from New York City, famous for plastering his name in big letters on his buildings, would be a champion in foreign policy? Big surprise: It turns out that being confident, tough, and aggressive works well for a president dealing with dangerous pipsqueaks like ISIS and North Korea.

Trump isn’t intimidated by anybody. Not by business rivals, not by critics, not by rogue FBI agents, not by foreign leaders. Certainly not by failed experts who urge meekness, caution, and limited goals.

Our president is devoted to one thing: winning for America. He does listen to our military and work with its members to achieve the possible. He does understand how power works. Korea could thumb its nose at us because it was protected by China. So, first, Trump removed that protection by going after China. The astute Sundance at Conservative Treehouse has been pointing out for months that the trade pressure on China was the prerequisite to movement on Korea. Our expert diplomats and analysts still don’t talk about this big picture. Trump is obviously a strategic thinker, as you have to be in the business world, as in the military.

It’s not all that complicated. Kim came to the table because Trump forced him to. North Korea was made to understand quite thoroughly and clearly that its grandstanding with nukes was over. Being clear was the first step to success. Trump has no toleration for a nuclear Korea, period. When communicated forcefully, through actions, not words, that was the game-changer.

Trump reversed Kim’s motivation 100%. Kim thought the nukes were his one ticket to security. Trump showed him that the nukes are his ticket to oblivion. That is why there is reason for optimism that this is not going to be the useless nuclear diplomacy we have had since Clinton.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Trump, Kim, and the Boys in the Camps By Jay Nordlinger

Posted By on June 13th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/trump-kim-and-the-boys-in-the-camps/

President Trump did an excellent thing at the State of the Union address last January. He honored Ji Seong-ho, an almost superhuman defector from North Korea. Ji escaped the country on crutches. I saw him at the Oslo Freedom Forum a couple of weeks ago. As I wrote, “he projects an air of ebullience. I can’t help thinking he is happy to be alive.”

Trump has said some shocking things in recent hours. For example, he said the following about Kim Jong-un: “He is very talented. Anybody who takes over a situation like he did at 26 years of age and is able to run it, and run it tough. I don’t say he was nice or say anything about it. He ran it, few people at that age — you could take one out of 10,000, could not do it.”

It is unclear how old Kim is. Probably, he was 28 when he inherited the dictatorship. But that is a triviality.

He has certainly “run it tough,” if that’s the way you want to characterize Kim’s rule over North Korea. His father chose him for his dictatorial mettle. This apple did not fall very far from the tree. Kim Jong-il passed over his two older sons to anoint the youngest, Jong-un. (If you would like to read more about this, consult my 2015 book, Children of Monsters.)

Two years ago, I interviewed another North Korean defector, Jung Gwang-il. (All North Korean escapees are considered defectors, because all North Koreans are supposed to belong to the state, body and soul.) Jung was in the gulag, like so many of his countrymen. Let me give a paragraph from the piece I wrote about him. It is a horrible paragraph, and you may wish to skip it, but here it is, in the interest of truth:

In the winter, the prisoners were made to get wood from the mountain. Many were injured or killed, as the trees fell or the logs rolled down the mountain. Other prisoners would not pause to bury the dead. It would have taken too much energy in the frozen ground. They carried the bodies back to a shed next to a latrine. At night, when you went to the latrine, you could hear moaning from the shed — some weren’t dead yet. By the spring, they were all dead, of course. The bodies had formed a great gelatinous mass. And Jung and the others would have to break it apart, with shovels, and bury it.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Bad Iranian Deal Was Always Going to Get Worse By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on June 13th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/iran-nuclear-deal-disaster-from-the-start/

The more we learn about it — as Iranian and Obama-administration deceptions are uncovered — the more we know it was a disaster from the start.

When Donald Trump withdrew from the so-called Iran deal in early May, almost all conventional wisdom in Washington was aghast.

The Left thought nullification would fast-track Iranian proliferation, incite more Iranian terrorism and adventurism, estrange our allies, and alienate a possible new friend.

Many on the conservative side (aside from Never Trumpers who are against anything Trump is for, including their own prior policies) thought it would have been wiser to back out slowly, or at least to have waited first for the duplicitous Iranians to get caught in clear violations, or to coordinate a joint withdrawal with the Europeans.

Few of these critics ever quite understood that the deal was already a stinking corpse, long overdue for burial. Iranian cunning and the strategic thinking about the asymmetrical deal had always aimed at the following trajectory:

Ostensibly postpone a bomb now, at a time when the regime was facing growing unrest and near bankruptcy from sanctions — and thus was in no position anyway to build an arsenal of bombs and missiles.

Keep occasionally cheating to ensure the apparatus for bomb-making was successfully hibernated — and therefore easily restarted at a future date.

Enjoy hundreds of billions of dollars in new commercial income over the next ten to 15 years to quiet domestic unrest, and to bank enough cash to go fully nuclear in the future.

Forge the so-called Shiite Crescent to the Mediterranean, by dominating Bashir al-Assad’s weak Syria, exploring anti-Sunni possibilities in Yemen, and bulking up Hezbollah’s Lebanon, while stocking a huge arsenal of preemptive missiles based near Israel. Hope that Iran’s regional strategic stature would only improve over the next decade.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Don and the Dictator How should the media react to Trump’s North Korea deal?

Posted By on June 13th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/don-and-the-dictator-1528831761

President Donald Trump seems to have given North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong Un a media coup and not received much in return—at least not yet. The joint statement signed by the U.S. President and North Korea’s leading thug says that the two countries will seek a lasting peace and the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. Mr. Trump says he received further disarmament promises beyond the written ones and the world will eventually find out if Mr. Kim fulfills them. In short, the Trump-Kim deal is precisely the kind of vague and well-meaning gesture in foreign affairs that the political left in the U.S. should love.

Tradition holds that such agreements are met with at least respectful coverage in the American media. For example, early in President Bill Clinton’s term the U.S. reached a similar agreement with North Korea’s communist dictatorship.

Twenty-five years ago today, the New York Times published an editorial called, “To Assure a Nuclear-Free Korea.” Given that Mr. Trump was in Singapore this week trying to persuade North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons program, it’s fair to say that the hopes invested by Times folk in the Clinton deal were not exactly realized. But back in 1993, the newspaper’s editorial board expressed admiration for officials in both the American and North Korean governments :

Deft diplomacy by the Clinton Administration has coaxed North Korea back from the brink. The North had threatened to bolt from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and build nuclear arms. It will now allow routine international inspections of its nuclear sites.

Gaining access to its nuclear waste sites will require further negotiation; that could provide more evidence of how much plutonium North Korea might already have produced. But the resumption of routine inspections is a critical first step toward assuring that the Korean Peninsula is truly nuclear-free.

The agreement is a tribute to sensible officials in Pyongyang who chose the path to prosperity over the road to ruin. It’s also a tribute to cool heads in Washington who refused to overreact to North Korea’s bizarre bargaining behavior.

Along with the tip of the cap to the “sensible officials in Pyongyang,” the Times went on to describe U.S. military exercises with our friends in democratic South Korea as “needlessly provocative.” Of course time would reveal that Washington’s cool heads had wildly underreacted. CONTINUE AT SITE

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Promises, Nuclear Promises Trump says he can tell Kim has changed, but the evidence is scant.

Posted By on June 13th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/promises-nuclear-promises-1528836251

Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un both received what they most wanted from their one-day summit in Singapore on Tuesday: Images of the two men shaking hands, talking across the table and getting along famously. Whether this photo-op summitry achieved anything beyond the bonhomie is a lot less clear.

In Mr. Trump’s telling, his willingness to engage in personal diplomacy has persuaded the young Kim to abandon the nuclear-weapons program that he and his forbears have spent decades building. Mr. Trump gave Kim the legitimacy of equal billing on the world stage, but the risk was worth the gamble and has paid off in an historic change of heart.

“Chairman Kim and I just signed a joint statement in which he reaffirmed his ‘unwavering commitment to complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,’” Mr. Trump told the press after the summit. “We also agreed to vigorous negotiations to implement the agreement as soon as possible. And he [Kim] wants to do that. This isn’t the past. This isn’t another administration that never got it started and therefore never got it done.”

In this telling, the two leaders have mapped out a non-nuclear future, Mr. Kim has agreed to a radical change in policy, and all that’s left is for the two sides to work out the details. Peace is at hand.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

When Reagan Went to the Wall: A Berlin-Singapore Nexus? By Carl M. Cannon

Posted By on June 13th, 2018

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/06/12/when_reagan_went_to_the_wall_a_berlin-singapore_nexus_137259.html

The unlikely meeting between President Donald J. Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has ended amid handshakes, expressions of goodwill, and hopes — but no proof — that something good has begun.

Thirty-one years ago today, a momentous speech in another part of the world lit another flame of possibility. The setting was Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, the very symbol of Europe’s Cold War division between the West and the Soviet-controlled “satellite” states.

As is true regarding Trump’s Korean gambit, those in the U.S. foreign policy establishment were skeptical of President Reagan’s intentions on his 1987 trip to Germany. At a delicate point in the long dance between the two superpowers, they didn’t want Reagan antagonizing Soviet leaders with bellicose language. Infighting broke out among White House aides. But the boss wasn’t dissuaded by the experts. “The boys at State are going to kill me for this,” Reagan told deputy White House chief of staff Kenneth Duberstein, “but it’s the right thing to do.”

* * *

When Ronald Reagan arrived in Berlin on June 12, 1987, relations between Washington and Moscow had progressed far past the “evil empire” rhetoric of Reagan’s first term. Although he received little credit for it either in the U.S. or abroad, Reagan had long been fixated on reducing the world’s nuclear arsenals. Kremlin leaders were receptive to this idea, but the sticking point had always been their aversion to allowing inspectors inside the Soviet Union to verify implementation of arms reduction agreements.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Byron York: On North Korea, a president who tried something different

Posted By on June 13th, 2018

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/byron-york-trump-tried-something-different-north-korea-summit

Reaction to President Trump’s summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has broken down along the usual Trump-anti-Trump divisions. The truth is, it will take a while before it’s clear whether the summit achieved anything or not.

But give the president credit for trying a new approach to an intractable problem.

Trump had no electoral mandate on North Korea. Despite the oversized role it has played in his presidency, the issue of Kim did not come up much in the 2016 campaign. It was rarely discussed in the GOP primary debates and wasn’t a factor in the Trump-Clinton general election debates.

Even when it did come up, the discussion could be pretty unedifying, as when rival GOP candidate Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., compared candidate Trump to Kim. “You have a lunatic in North Korea trying to get access to nuclear weapons,” Rubio said in February 2016. “We have a lunatic in America trying to get hold of them, too.”

To the extent that he had a position on North Korea, Trump’s was that he would be willing to hold direct negotiations with Kim. While he said he would not travel to North Korea to see Kim, and would not honor him with a White House dinner, Trump made clear he saw benefit in talking to the North Korean leader.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Gaza: The inconvenient truth the Arabs fear most Victor Sharpe

Posted By on June 13th, 2018

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe

Scan the internet, along with the print and broadcast media, and you would be convinced by the sheer volume of fake news about Gaza that Israel occupies it and treats its Arab population with utmost cruelty. It is abase lie and another enormous Arab scam.

Of course, the fact that the so-called Disengagement Plan took place in 2005 is hidden or hardly mentioned at all. During that lamentable decision, Israel unilaterally demolished the 25 Jewish villages and farms – along with the schools and synagogues – that graced the territory, forced the Jewish villagers to abandon their homes and become refugees in Israel, and handed over control of Gaza to the Palestinian Authority.

That suicidal Israeli decision was taken by then Israel Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, in the naïve hope that Israel’s hand of peace would be reciprocated by the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians. It has, however, become an enormous self-inflicted Israeli tragedy as unremitting terror from Hamas occupied Gaza has reached unprecedented levels.

And it is conveniently ignored by the same fake news outlets that a bloody coup against the PA subsequently occurred when the Muslim Brotherhood’s Hamas terror branch brutally expelled the regime of Mahmoud Abbas and his own Fatah terror organization. Hamas is now the occupier of Gaza, employing a despotic reign of terror on both its population and against the Israeli villages and towns that border the Gaza Strip.