Japanese Expert Believes Trump Administration Will Recognize North Korea as a Nuclear State

This is called recognizing reality, North Korea is not going to give up their nuclear weapons:

Donald Trump in his second term as president is likely to accept North Korea as a nuclear weapons state and ask for more defense spending by America’s Asian partners, a Japanese foreign policy expert told reporters Thursday.

Those close to Trump see no hope of denuclearizing North Korea during his second term, according to Meikai University professor Tetsuo Kotani, a senior fellow at The Japan Institute of International Affairs.

“According to President-elect Trump, he’s going to recognize that (nuclear weapons power) status for North Korea so that he can bring North Korea to the negotiation for nuclear arms control,” Kotani, an expert in international relations, said in translated remarks during an online conference at the Foreign Press Center Japan.

Stars and Stripes

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The timeframe to denuclearize North Korea has already passed. It was possible in the 1998-2010 time period, but instead of insisting for denuclearization before giving financial incentives, the South Korean government instead gave billions to North Korea. The Kim regime did not use this money to improve their economy or the lives of their people as the Korean left thought they would, instead the money was used to expand their nuclear weapons program.

The Kim regime rightly strategized that a larger nuclear threat would give them greater bargaining power to get more funding from South Korea, bring the regime international prestige, and most importantly better security for the regime. Why would they give this up? This is why the best deal the U.S. can hope for now is to get them to scrap their ICBM program and put a limit on their nuclear weapons in return for sanctions relief.