Pre-Summit Hype, Communist Thug Style
There is some reporting this week that Kim Jong-un is trying to shore up his hold on power in an emaciated and dying “nation” by culling his population of anyone who still has money or food.
According to Andrew Jeong at The Wall Street Journal, Kim
has exiled, imprisoned or executed suspected opponents of his diplomatic outreach to the U.S. and South Korea, while also targeting his country’s moneyed elite with asset seizures, according to a new report that details a purge of some 50 to 70 individuals.
Does arresting and killing his opponents sound like a promising sign in a man Donald Trump says is a very talented guy whom he likes a lot? That the victims of these arrests and summary executions were “opponents” or “hardliners” is completely speculative, of course, as is the question of whether the whole story is anything but pre-summit propaganda.
This might be a good opportunity, however, to remind everyone of what the upcoming second Kim-Trump “summit” is about, from the point of view of rational adults, rather than Trump cultists.
As I have explained repeatedly over the past several months, all the cute talk of a “nuclear-free Korean peninsula,” which is a euphemism for imposing weapons restrictions on the democratic and pro-West South, including removing all American military presence on the peninsula, has been a chief demand of both North Korea and China for years. The goal is to play moral equivalency games, refusing to relinquish anything until the world agrees to enforce equal limitations on the self-defense capabilities of South Korea — i.e., completely neuters the most vibrant free market and most stable democracy in the region.
The only differences this time around are that (a) China and North Korea have found an American president dumb and cowardly enough to make “peace at all costs” an American foreign policy goal, while declaring this a victory, and (b) South Korea currently has its most overtly socialist regime, and is therefore playing for all the marbles on a hurried-up reunification strategy that would force a gradual blending of the North’s communist “economy” and political structure with an increasingly socialized economy and political structure in the South.
Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong-un are working together from superficially opposite directions to flatter the Orange Idiot into making their mutual dreams come true, at the expense of real freedom and security for tens of millions of Koreans — and at the price of greater Chinese hegemony in an already endangered region.
The very best any reasonable person can say in defense of these “negotiations” — and think for a moment of how the forward-looking communist dictators Kim and Xi Jinping viewed Trump’s recent performance against the two-bit hack socialist Nancy Pelosi — is that it is impossible to know for sure whether Kim is sincere about giving up his nuclear arsenal this time. While it is true that no one knows what is happening in North Korea, it certainly takes only the bare minimum of common sense to expect the worst, given the duplicitous, soulless killers we are dealing with, rather than imagining “this time it might really work out!” Why might this time be different?
No one reading this article is silly enough to imagine Trump will be the difference. So why shouldn’t we make the safe, precedent-based assumption that a regime built on a death cult and supported by the most powerful and farsighted communist force on the planet today means no good in the long run? That the North is desperate for food and might be negotiating for regime survival I do not doubt. But why should the U.S. be in the business of artificially propping up dying communist regimes?
To help China achieve its strategic goals in the region? Why?
As in all other areas where Trump claims victory and boasts of achieving what no other president has ever achieved, why shouldn’t we assume that here, too, his alleged victory is all optics, and based on lowering the standards of winning so radically (due to his vanity and ignorance) that any so-called victory will be Pyrrhic at best?
I live in South Korea — which I do not note as a way of trumping anyone else’s view, but merely to point out that I’m watching this thing play out from a different angle, and specifically focusing on Moon Jae-in’s subversive “transformational” goals (à la Obama). I think Trump is being played for a chump on all sides, and since this would match up well with Trump’s usual position relative to everyone, domestic and foreign, I choose to stick with that interpretation until I see concrete evidence to the contrary.
