The Road To Singapore III: Let's Get the Hell Out of Singapore

When Donald Trump arrived in Singapore, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un had nuclear weapons.

 

When Donald Trump departed from Singapore, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un still has nuclear weapons.

 

OK, I’m being silly here. No one expected Trump to take off in Air Force One with boxes of nuclear warheads and weapons grade plutonium in the cargo hold while Kim Jong Un waddled back to North Korea to live a nuclear free idyllic paradise. 

 

But what, pray tell, did Trump get for his trouble?  While the document that Li’l Donnie and Li’l Kim provided broad promises for  North Korea to work toward the “complete denuclearization” of the Korean peninsula, it does not contain any firm promises from Kim to stop North Korea’s nuclear weapon program. 

 

While the agreement between Trump and Kim has the impetus of historic significance in that a sitting President met with the leader of North Korea, there is very little in this agreement that is actually historic. The document echoes language used in  statements made by North Korea 25 years ago in a similar joint declaration with the U.S. and appears to contain little more than what the North has already promised in the past.

 

Trump flew a half a world away to get what we already have.

 

There was at least one concession that was new and significant and (what a surprise!) it was made by Trump. 

 

Trump agreed to the cessation of joint military training exercises between the United States and South Korea.

 

Which came as a surprise to both the Pentagon AND South Korea. 

 

Joint military training exercises between the United States and South Korea have been a thing for decades. It’s also been a thing for just as long for North Korean leaders to complain, citing this training is a provocation for war, blah, blah, blah.  Kim Jong Un has kept up the whining about this topic has did his father before him and his grandfather before that. 

 

Getting Trump to agree to stopping those military exercises is exactly the sort of acquiescence that everyone was afraid Li’l Donnie would toddle off into in a desperate bid to the make the person on the other side of the table like him. 

 

Giving up something so significant and so easily makes Trump seem (Oh, what’s the word) “weak” and not clearing this with his allies or his own military seems a tad (how should I put this?) “dishonest”.