Considering John Bolton’s recent comments about North Korea, I think it is pretty clear that President Trump is putting people in position that will support hard measures against the Kim regime if negotiations fail:
John Bolton
When John Bolton talks of war, on the other hand, it’s more explicable. “Question: How do you know that the North Korean regime is lying? Answer: Their lips are moving,” he said on Fox News shortly after news broke that Trump and Kim Jong Un had agreed to participate in direct talks on “denuclearization” by May. The North Koreans aren’t going to voluntarily abandon their goal of obtaining nuclear-tipped long-range missiles, he argued. “They want to buy time: three months, six months, 12 months—whatever it is they need to get across the finish line. What Trump did … is foreshorten that period” by organizing a meeting that can quickly expose North Korea insincerity about relinquishing its nuclear program anytime soon. (“I may leave fast or we may sit down and make the greatest deal for the world,” Trump himself recently predicted.) “Rather than having the low-level negotiations rising to the mid-level negotiations rising to the high-level negotiations, finally rising to a summit meeting—that’ll be two years from now, they’ll have deliverable nuclear weapons,” Bolton explained. “That we cannot allow.” [The Atlantic]
You can read the whole article at the link.
I think President Trump’s quick acceptance and short timeframe for conducting the summit combined with his recent appointments of Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Bolton has to be putting significant pressure on the Kim regime that past delay games are not going to work this time.
