It looks like people are starting to realize that President Trump has been following John Bolton’s advice all along in regards to North Korea:
First, Trump could simply choose to shrug, continue to tweet that the North Korean threat has evaporated, and direct Pompeo to secure concessions in any way possible. This would be a likely path to appeasing Pyongyang, resulting in the United States giving up valuable leverage for virtually cosmetic North Korean concessions like the reversible dismantlement of tunnel entrances at the Punggye-ri nuclear site. North Korea has plenty of old and now out-of-use nuclear and missile sites it could happily detonate before the international press.
Second, Trump could simply allow the North Korea process that began on June 12 to quietly collapse and put the issue of its nuclear program and disarmament on ice—call it a return to “strategic patience.”
The problem here is that the administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign is all but dead after the Singapore summit and it’s more likely than not that China, along with Russia, will ease up on the implementation of existing sanctions and perhaps even call for a removal of United Nations sanctions applied in 2017 on North Korean exports.
In this scenario, the U.S. loses interest and North Korea benefits economically while continuing to build out its nuclear program without constraints. This would be the equivalent of a continuation of the muddling-through approach that three consecutive U.S. administrations found themselves resigned to with North Korea, updated for the era of a considerably more capable North Korea.
Third, Trump could find himself left with nothing but the literal nuclear option. Feeling spurned and humiliated by Kim, Trump may find that the only way to move forward is to let John Bolton’s March 2017 prophecy come true.
Weeks before entering the White House as Trump’s advisor on national security affairs, Bolton, as a private citizen, had remarked on Trump’s acceptance of Kim’s invitation that “[The purpose of this process is to] foreshorten the amount of time that we’re going to waste in negotiations that will never produce the result we want, which is Kim giving up his nuclear program.”
Gone would be the days of “all options” being on the table. Trump might conclude then that the only path to denuclearization is an all-out military strike on North Korea—a trigger to a nuclear war that would engulf Northeast Asia in tremendous destruction and likely parts of the U.S. homeland, given North Korea’s intercontinental-range ballistic missile capability.
None of these scenarios are appealing, though the third is quite clearly the worst. Trump’s Monday tweet offers the clearest glimpse of why diplomacy-for-diplomacy’s-sake with North Korea can be dangerous—even if it pulled us back from the brink of “fire and fury.” [Daily Beast]
You can read more at the link, but I have been saying this for quite sometime that I think the Trump administration is simply giving the Kim regime one last chance to rejoin the world community and denuclearize. It almost seems like they are checking every box to say they have tried every peaceful means to get them to denuclearize. If the Kim regime does not take advantage of this chance I think other options will be seriously considered and appeasement which this article suggests will not be one of those options.
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