Retired basketball star Dennis Rodman traveled to Singapore to support the summit between his friends Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un. His trip was sponsored by Potcoin, the marihuana-themed cryptocurrency, although drug dealers are executed in Singapore - a good idea according to Trump. (In North Korea, on the other hand, smoking weed is one of the few vices that's tolerated.)
If you thought this wasn't weird enough, Trump showed Kim a fake movie trailer to illustrate how awesome their legacy would be if they made peace:
The trailer reminded me of the intro to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, which seems appropriate when destroying the planet is on the table:
Maybe there's something to the theory that the simulation we live in took a wrong turn somewhere in 2015. Or the world is real but the Internet has ruined our normality filters. Back when Winston Rowntree published a comic about Princess Washburn, a 6000 year old demon who feeds on slight discomfort, like awkward silences during a telephone conversation, I agreed with the message that fiction is stranger than truth. But now I think: I've seen stranger creatures on Tumblr.
To add to the hilarity, Fox News announced the summit as the meeting between the two dictators:
A beautiful Freudian slip. And as usual, there was an embarrassing Trump tweet from the past:
Call me a Trump fan, but I'm not too worried about the result of the summit. Which is rather vague - the most concrete promise is that the US will stop conducting large-scale exercises with the South Korean army, to the surprise of both the Republic of Korea government and the local US military commanders.
Of course Kim isn't going to give up his nukes. That would be suicide. He knows what happened to Khaddafi and Saddam Hussein. He knows how long Obama's Iran deal lasted. Don't worry, we're just going to pretend that he did.
This is fine.
We live in the best of all possible worlds.
When Kim Jong-il was leader of the DPRK, there was a predictable pattern. He would provoke the US by firing off a rocket or shelling a South Korean fishing boat, and later he would relent, promising to behave better in exchange for food aid. Diplomats ran in circles, while any violent response would have turned into a disaster.
Whatever Trump's motivation was (probably a mix of flattery and corruption), just randomly giving the Communist regime what they want is actually a better strategy than seriously negotiating. The only way to get anywhere near regime change is to open up North Korea by increasing economic cooperation. The worst thing that could happen is that we reduce tensions with a murderous totalitarian state and improve the situation of the population a little bit, like the grain sales from the US to the Soviet Union did.
Does anybody believe that the DPRK is strong enough to attack Seoul unprovoked, or stupid enough to risk being annihilated in a nuclear war?
The North Korean people have a siege mentality. They know that they're poor, but they probably blame the US more than their own government. They didn't even rebel when there was a massive famine. War games and sanctions aren't going to make a difference either. North Koreans have good reasons to believe the propaganda that the US is their mortal enemy. In the West, we forgot how devastating the Korean War was for the North. The US dropped 635,000 tons of bombs, until the Air Force ran out of targets. According to a South Korean estimate, 1.5 million civilians died in the North. The war ended in a stalemate, but only rubble was left on the Northern side.
Trump has a point when he admires Kim Jong-un for being a strong leader at only 35 years old. Even before the summit, Kim cleverly distanced himself from China by killing China's strongest allies in his family, postponing a visit to Beijing and being unreliable about economic cooperation. It's unlikely that he will be overthrown by the military. His grandfather's comrades, the only people who might have the authority to oppose him, are dying.
Putting pressure on a country with sanctions and limited violence might work in some cases (like Serbia in the past two decades or South Africa during apartheid), but a strong totalitarian regime could only be defeated by attacking it head-on. And we already tried that 65 years ago. I don't know if an 'embracing tightly' strategy will work better, but it's the safest bet.