I expected this kind of unreliability about the deal, but not from the US. I thought that the executive branch would at least try to come to terms with NK, but it surprises me that it has devolved...
I expected this kind of unreliability about the deal, but not from the US. I thought that the executive branch would at least try to come to terms with NK, but it surprises me that it has devolved into an on-again-off-again deal on the US side, while NK appears to be open at all times.
I agree with that it's a negotiation tactic. The question is whether it's becoming of a superpower. I'd expect this kind of tactic to be used by the underdog, not the world leader. The US should...
I agree with that it's a negotiation tactic. The question is whether it's becoming of a superpower. I'd expect this kind of tactic to be used by the underdog, not the world leader. The US should be leveraging its influence in the region before resorting to petty tactics such as this.
I agree. The US should be the one taking a higher stance, not the lower. Based on the administrations tactics with other trade it looks to be the modern "wild west."
I agree. The US should be the one taking a higher stance, not the lower. Based on the administrations tactics with other trade it looks to be the modern "wild west."
Agreed. There have been moments when the US has looked like a toddler throwing a tantrum. The recent steel tariffs is a great example... I worry leadership is too focussed on some things, and...
Agreed. There have been moments when the US has looked like a toddler throwing a tantrum. The recent steel tariffs is a great example... I worry leadership is too focussed on some things, and failing to attend to the big picture.
Perhaps Trump believes he is the underdog in this situation. It would jive well with other stories about how embattled his administration has felt since they took office.
Perhaps Trump believes he is the underdog in this situation. It would jive well with other stories about how embattled his administration has felt since they took office.
I'm not sure i understand. You want the US to go into peace negotiations with someone we've been at war with since the 1950s without being willing to walk away from a bad deal? This is a normal...
I'm not sure i understand. You want the US to go into peace negotiations with someone we've been at war with since the 1950s without being willing to walk away from a bad deal? This is a normal process.
Is it walking away from a bad deal, if they haven't yet met to discuss the deal? I acknowledge that negotiations such as these aren't entirely conducted by national leaders, but I think that the...
Is it walking away from a bad deal, if they haven't yet met to discuss the deal? I acknowledge that negotiations such as these aren't entirely conducted by national leaders, but I think that the symbolism is important. For a global superpower to meet with a small nation, especially one with which they've been at war with, displays a willingness to listen to those less powerful than oneself. If the US wishes to remain a global leader, they .just display leadership. I don't feel that walking away from a negotiation table in this way is the right way to do this
That's certainly one way to look at it. I don't see it the same way. From my perspective, this is our Negotiator in Chief, who wrote The Art of the Deal, doing exactly what is in his book, and...
That's certainly one way to look at it. I don't see it the same way.
From my perspective, this is our Negotiator in Chief, who wrote The Art of the Deal, doing exactly what is in his book, and what we elected him to be.
Obviously I have my biases and you have yours - so how do we know which model more accurately reflects reality? I would posit that it is whichever model is better at predicting the future.
My model predicts that we will have peace with North Korea - maybe not immediately, but probably within a few years at most, and that they will be very happy to no longer be cut off from South Korea, from trade and a boom in prosperity the likes of which a nation has never seen.
If Donald Trump is acting like a teenager who wants to be begged to come to a party, if he is not actually employing skillful negotiation strategy, what does that model predict about the future?
It's a shitty negotiation tactic that might work in egoistic "powerplay" business deals but does not benefit a country who has to maintain a reputation. Madman theory didn't work.
It's a shitty negotiation tactic that might work in egoistic "powerplay" business deals but does not benefit a country who has to maintain a reputation. Madman theory didn't work.
I'm not sure if this is the case, but maybe it's because NK wants something from the US so it will really only hurt them to back out, whereas the US want's to help NK only if they agree to certain...
I'm not sure if this is the case, but maybe it's because NK wants something from the US so it will really only hurt them to back out, whereas the US want's to help NK only if they agree to certain demands.
Slightly more substantial article: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-usa/in-complete-reversal-trump-revives-summit-with-north-korean-leader-idUSKCN1IV2NS I'm surprised how much he...
Trump abruptly called off the summit on May 24 after North Korea sharply criticized U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton. “I think we’re over that, totally over that,” Trump said on Friday.
I'm not. There was a brief period of time just after the election when I had hoped (really, sincerely hoped!) that he would surprise us, but at this point I've been well-inured to his uh......
I'm not.
There was a brief period of time just after the election when I had hoped (really, sincerely hoped!) that he would surprise us, but at this point I've been well-inured to his uh... embarassing affect. He's a giant fucking baby.
I can't believe even the media isn't catching up on this, but this is all just posturing and pre-negotiation. In case you didn't notice with the trade tariffs, Trump is predictable in his...
I can't believe even the media isn't catching up on this, but this is all just posturing and pre-negotiation. In case you didn't notice with the trade tariffs, Trump is predictable in his negotiation tactics: he likes to ramp up the stakes like crazy up front, so he can then de-escalate and sound reasonable when a deal is struck.
What happened so far with the whole June 12 meeting is that Trump and Kim signaled to each other they wanted this meeting to happen, but then Trump ramped up the stakes by getting offended at some random bullshit the DPRK said.
This prompted Kim and Moon Jae-in to hold a second meeting where they reaffirmed their commitment to the negotiations. The message here was, "If this meeting falls through, it's entirely the U.S.'s fault because we both want this to happen."
Unsurprisingly, the meeting is now back on.
The same is gonna happen with the trade tariffs, mark my words. There's gonna be some angry posturing for a while, then a deal will be struck and everybody will be elated the impasse was resolved. And Trump gets to look like the tough negotiator who didn't flinch and (to his base) stared down his own allies to get a better deal.
I find it interesting that in both cases, it was Mike Pence that was used as the reason for the negotiations to fall through. In the case of the trade tariffs, Pence called up Trudeau with an additional request that the NAFTA agreement has a sundown clause added. In the case of the June 12th meeting, Pence said something bad about North Korea, which predictably got a rise out of them.
Now, I'm not saying this is good diplomacy by any means. For one, if I can spot it, then it's a weak and predictable move. It's also a bluff that can lead to unforeseen consequences: it might work in business where your negotiation counterpart is thinking rationally about the bottom line, but we're talking countries, here. Canada's population, for instance, might force Trudeau to stick to his guns even if it would make better financial sense to cave in.
Plus, diplomacy AND business work poorly when they're a conflict of dominance. Unsurprisingly, it sounds like a negotiation tactic right out of the sixties. Both diplomacy and business nowadays are more about establishing trust, which is something you build gradually, over time. If one partner comes out cowed, they will resent it and look elsewhere for a long-term partnership. You can already see the damage with Canada... Even if NAFTA gets resolved, there's a sacred trust, built long over time, that's getting eroded. Fortunately for all of us, everybody seems to be blaming Trump himself and not the U.S. as a body of government. (I.e. Trudeau saying in veiled terms that all this will come to pass once Trump is out of office).
It MIGHT be the best strategy going into negotiations with North Korea, though. It's no secret that Trump's brinkmanship on the Peninsula has led China to pressure the DPRK to negotiate. And given that Kim rushed to a second meeting with Moon, it looks like he DOES respond to pressure.
Sound reasonable to whom? Most of the world distrusts him. A bit more than half his own country distrusts him. He is so notoriously lying about the pettiest shit that it strains credulity to trust...
In case you didn't notice with the trade tariffs, Trump is predictable in his negotiation tactics: he likes to ramp up the stakes like crazy up front, so he can then de-escalate and sound reasonable when a deal is struck.
Sound reasonable to whom? Most of the world distrusts him. A bit more than half his own country distrusts him. He is so notoriously lying about the pettiest shit that it strains credulity to trust him over the basic ability to tell the truth about what he ate for breakfast (though, to be sure, as soon as any news about his breakfast choices surfaced, someone would make a story outraged about it).
I marked the words of people who said during the campaign that Trump was going to mellow out when he became president because he'd been putting on an act to get elected. I typically take people at face value, but I was willing to try to give them a fair, open mind about how he'd act. That didn't turn out. Basically the first week in he screwed that pooch with an outrageously inept travel ban that didn't even allow for individuals with green cards and student visas to enter the country from impacted states.
It's no secret that Trump's brinkmanship on the Peninsula has led China to pressure the DPRK to negotiate.
It's hard to argue with alternatives when it comes to history because, well, we only got one timeline to work with, but I would question how much of a relationship necessarily exists between Trump's brinkmanship and Chinese intervention. It seems just as likely that it was North Korea's brinkmanship that inspired China's actions, since the US has long been rather consistently brinkmanship-y when it comes to nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula. Trump's brinkmanship here is consistent with a long line of US policy, but for the insults made on twitter and the self-defeating insults and denunciations of his own diplomatic staff. How can it be said that publicly undermining his own secretary of state, who was trying to negotiate this type of meeting, helped achieve one?
I'm not saying it's working. I'm saying that's what he thinks he's doing. You're right, the end result of this brinkmanship tactic is that even his allies are looking for ways they can rely less...
Sound reasonable to whom? Most of the world distrusts him.
I'm not saying it's working. I'm saying that's what he thinks he's doing. You're right, the end result of this brinkmanship tactic is that even his allies are looking for ways they can rely less and less on America moving forward. I didn't claim it was smart. (In fact I argued the opposite in my post.)
It seems just as likely that it was North Korea's brinkmanship that inspired China's actions, since the US has long been rather consistently brinkmanship-y when it comes to nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula. Trump's brinkmanship here is consistent with a long line of US policy, but for the insults made on twitter and the self-defeating insults and denunciations of his own diplomatic staff. How can it be said that publicly undermining his own secretary of state, who was trying to negotiate this type of meeting, helped achieve one?
I disagree.
For one, the U.S. has been appeasing when it comes to North Korea. They've consistently tried to calm down the situation. Brinkmanship means pushing things to an extreme so your opponent gets scared, and that's not what the U.S. has been doing... until Trump.
Trump, by credibly being an idiot, demonstrated the one thing Obama never could: that he was enough of a crazy motherfucker to go to war with North Korea even if he had to start it. For all his skill at diplomacy, Obama was clearly a smart man, and thus a rational actor. If you want to play the game of brinkmanship, you have to be believably crazy.
The picture of the Trump Administration is one of irrationality. That's a great thing to have your enemies believe when you're playing nuclear chicken.
Here's North Korea expert Andrei Lankov on the subject. He's the one who clued me in to the idea that Trump has, against all odds, succeeded in bringing North Korea to the table. It's also something the South Koreans themselves have recognized.
I'm not a fan of Trump, by the way. If anything, the moron just played it the way he learned to act in first grade and got a lucky break. You know what they say about broken clocks. I'm sure he's not purposely tweeting idiotic streams of consciousness just to establish a credible brinkmanship persona... Or is he!
Are we talking about the same US that labeled North Korea a member of "The Axis of Evil" as part of the rallying cry to drumming the war beat against terrorism in the wake of 9.11? I will peg...
For one, the U.S. has been appeasing when it comes to North Korea. They've consistently tried to calm down the situation.
Are we talking about the same US that labeled North Korea a member of "The Axis of Evil" as part of the rallying cry to drumming the war beat against terrorism in the wake of 9.11?
I will peg Obama for one thing above all others when it came to his foreign policy, and that is his obvious, resolute refusal to engage American troops in any more conflicts after Libya. The telltale sign? That dumbass red line in Syria. You don't talk about red lines if you're not willing to react when they're crossed.
I'll have to read the article when I wake up, because I do enjoy these sorts of takes, but I struggle to see this as a huge win for Trump even with him screaming "WILDCARD" every other week.
Last thing I will say before (finally) sleeping is that I don't take you for a happy praiser of Trump. I'm just not sold by this one thing you're praising. I think there's more than enough public evidence out there to demonstrate that China and North Korea's motives are mixed and not entirely (if at all) in response to Trump's actions and provocations. It's unclear whether Trump was the one who was able to make this happen or whether North Korean advances in nuclear weaponry allowed them to feel comfortable advancing the way they have (or some combination). It's unlikely we'll know very clearly how much Chinese pressure played a role in North Korean calculus, short of some one from that inner circle turning coat and seeing asylum.
All these things have some measure of speculation involved because none of us--no expert either--is a mind reader.
I expected this kind of unreliability about the deal, but not from the US. I thought that the executive branch would at least try to come to terms with NK, but it surprises me that it has devolved into an on-again-off-again deal on the US side, while NK appears to be open at all times.
This is a negotiation tactic. Also, north korea pulled out at least once previously.
I agree with that it's a negotiation tactic. The question is whether it's becoming of a superpower. I'd expect this kind of tactic to be used by the underdog, not the world leader. The US should be leveraging its influence in the region before resorting to petty tactics such as this.
I agree. The US should be the one taking a higher stance, not the lower. Based on the administrations tactics with other trade it looks to be the modern "wild west."
Agreed. There have been moments when the US has looked like a toddler throwing a tantrum. The recent steel tariffs is a great example... I worry leadership is too focussed on some things, and failing to attend to the big picture.
Perhaps Trump believes he is the underdog in this situation. It would jive well with other stories about how embattled his administration has felt since they took office.
I'm not sure i understand. You want the US to go into peace negotiations with someone we've been at war with since the 1950s without being willing to walk away from a bad deal? This is a normal process.
Is it walking away from a bad deal, if they haven't yet met to discuss the deal? I acknowledge that negotiations such as these aren't entirely conducted by national leaders, but I think that the symbolism is important. For a global superpower to meet with a small nation, especially one with which they've been at war with, displays a willingness to listen to those less powerful than oneself. If the US wishes to remain a global leader, they .just display leadership. I don't feel that walking away from a negotiation table in this way is the right way to do this
They are not walking away from a deal. They are acting like a teenager that want to be begged to come to the party.
It's kind of ridiculous.
That's certainly one way to look at it. I don't see it the same way.
From my perspective, this is our Negotiator in Chief, who wrote The Art of the Deal, doing exactly what is in his book, and what we elected him to be.
Obviously I have my biases and you have yours - so how do we know which model more accurately reflects reality? I would posit that it is whichever model is better at predicting the future.
My model predicts that we will have peace with North Korea - maybe not immediately, but probably within a few years at most, and that they will be very happy to no longer be cut off from South Korea, from trade and a boom in prosperity the likes of which a nation has never seen.
If Donald Trump is acting like a teenager who wants to be begged to come to a party, if he is not actually employing skillful negotiation strategy, what does that model predict about the future?
It's a shitty negotiation tactic that might work in egoistic "powerplay" business deals but does not benefit a country who has to maintain a reputation. Madman theory didn't work.
I'm not sure if this is the case, but maybe it's because NK wants something from the US so it will really only hurt them to back out, whereas the US want's to help NK only if they agree to certain demands.
Slightly more substantial article: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-usa/in-complete-reversal-trump-revives-summit-with-north-korean-leader-idUSKCN1IV2NS
I'm surprised how much he sounds like a toddler.
It's crazy how a man known for name calling got so upset about it. Just like a child.
I'm not.
There was a brief period of time just after the election when I had hoped (really, sincerely hoped!) that he would surprise us, but at this point I've been well-inured to his uh... embarassing affect. He's a giant fucking baby.
I can't believe even the media isn't catching up on this, but this is all just posturing and pre-negotiation. In case you didn't notice with the trade tariffs, Trump is predictable in his negotiation tactics: he likes to ramp up the stakes like crazy up front, so he can then de-escalate and sound reasonable when a deal is struck.
What happened so far with the whole June 12 meeting is that Trump and Kim signaled to each other they wanted this meeting to happen, but then Trump ramped up the stakes by getting offended at some random bullshit the DPRK said.
This prompted Kim and Moon Jae-in to hold a second meeting where they reaffirmed their commitment to the negotiations. The message here was, "If this meeting falls through, it's entirely the U.S.'s fault because we both want this to happen."
Unsurprisingly, the meeting is now back on.
The same is gonna happen with the trade tariffs, mark my words. There's gonna be some angry posturing for a while, then a deal will be struck and everybody will be elated the impasse was resolved. And Trump gets to look like the tough negotiator who didn't flinch and (to his base) stared down his own allies to get a better deal.
I find it interesting that in both cases, it was Mike Pence that was used as the reason for the negotiations to fall through. In the case of the trade tariffs, Pence called up Trudeau with an additional request that the NAFTA agreement has a sundown clause added. In the case of the June 12th meeting, Pence said something bad about North Korea, which predictably got a rise out of them.
Now, I'm not saying this is good diplomacy by any means. For one, if I can spot it, then it's a weak and predictable move. It's also a bluff that can lead to unforeseen consequences: it might work in business where your negotiation counterpart is thinking rationally about the bottom line, but we're talking countries, here. Canada's population, for instance, might force Trudeau to stick to his guns even if it would make better financial sense to cave in.
Plus, diplomacy AND business work poorly when they're a conflict of dominance. Unsurprisingly, it sounds like a negotiation tactic right out of the sixties. Both diplomacy and business nowadays are more about establishing trust, which is something you build gradually, over time. If one partner comes out cowed, they will resent it and look elsewhere for a long-term partnership. You can already see the damage with Canada... Even if NAFTA gets resolved, there's a sacred trust, built long over time, that's getting eroded. Fortunately for all of us, everybody seems to be blaming Trump himself and not the U.S. as a body of government. (I.e. Trudeau saying in veiled terms that all this will come to pass once Trump is out of office).
It MIGHT be the best strategy going into negotiations with North Korea, though. It's no secret that Trump's brinkmanship on the Peninsula has led China to pressure the DPRK to negotiate. And given that Kim rushed to a second meeting with Moon, it looks like he DOES respond to pressure.
Sound reasonable to whom? Most of the world distrusts him. A bit more than half his own country distrusts him. He is so notoriously lying about the pettiest shit that it strains credulity to trust him over the basic ability to tell the truth about what he ate for breakfast (though, to be sure, as soon as any news about his breakfast choices surfaced, someone would make a story outraged about it).
I marked the words of people who said during the campaign that Trump was going to mellow out when he became president because he'd been putting on an act to get elected. I typically take people at face value, but I was willing to try to give them a fair, open mind about how he'd act. That didn't turn out. Basically the first week in he screwed that pooch with an outrageously inept travel ban that didn't even allow for individuals with green cards and student visas to enter the country from impacted states.
It's hard to argue with alternatives when it comes to history because, well, we only got one timeline to work with, but I would question how much of a relationship necessarily exists between Trump's brinkmanship and Chinese intervention. It seems just as likely that it was North Korea's brinkmanship that inspired China's actions, since the US has long been rather consistently brinkmanship-y when it comes to nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula. Trump's brinkmanship here is consistent with a long line of US policy, but for the insults made on twitter and the self-defeating insults and denunciations of his own diplomatic staff. How can it be said that publicly undermining his own secretary of state, who was trying to negotiate this type of meeting, helped achieve one?
I'm not saying it's working. I'm saying that's what he thinks he's doing. You're right, the end result of this brinkmanship tactic is that even his allies are looking for ways they can rely less and less on America moving forward. I didn't claim it was smart. (In fact I argued the opposite in my post.)
I disagree.
For one, the U.S. has been appeasing when it comes to North Korea. They've consistently tried to calm down the situation. Brinkmanship means pushing things to an extreme so your opponent gets scared, and that's not what the U.S. has been doing... until Trump.
Trump, by credibly being an idiot, demonstrated the one thing Obama never could: that he was enough of a crazy motherfucker to go to war with North Korea even if he had to start it. For all his skill at diplomacy, Obama was clearly a smart man, and thus a rational actor. If you want to play the game of brinkmanship, you have to be believably crazy.
The picture of the Trump Administration is one of irrationality. That's a great thing to have your enemies believe when you're playing nuclear chicken.
Here's North Korea expert Andrei Lankov on the subject. He's the one who clued me in to the idea that Trump has, against all odds, succeeded in bringing North Korea to the table. It's also something the South Koreans themselves have recognized.
I'm not a fan of Trump, by the way. If anything, the moron just played it the way he learned to act in first grade and got a lucky break. You know what they say about broken clocks. I'm sure he's not purposely tweeting idiotic streams of consciousness just to establish a credible brinkmanship persona... Or is he!
Are we talking about the same US that labeled North Korea a member of "The Axis of Evil" as part of the rallying cry to drumming the war beat against terrorism in the wake of 9.11?
I will peg Obama for one thing above all others when it came to his foreign policy, and that is his obvious, resolute refusal to engage American troops in any more conflicts after Libya. The telltale sign? That dumbass red line in Syria. You don't talk about red lines if you're not willing to react when they're crossed.
I'll have to read the article when I wake up, because I do enjoy these sorts of takes, but I struggle to see this as a huge win for Trump even with him screaming "WILDCARD" every other week.
Last thing I will say before (finally) sleeping is that I don't take you for a happy praiser of Trump. I'm just not sold by this one thing you're praising. I think there's more than enough public evidence out there to demonstrate that China and North Korea's motives are mixed and not entirely (if at all) in response to Trump's actions and provocations. It's unclear whether Trump was the one who was able to make this happen or whether North Korean advances in nuclear weaponry allowed them to feel comfortable advancing the way they have (or some combination). It's unlikely we'll know very clearly how much Chinese pressure played a role in North Korean calculus, short of some one from that inner circle turning coat and seeing asylum.
All these things have some measure of speculation involved because none of us--no expert either--is a mind reader.
I wonder if he did this just so he can storm off during the meeting, claim Kim was unreasonable and then return to his refusal to work with NK.