Joshua brings the ice bucket

While Styxhexenhammer666 has been relentlessly positive about the work Trump has done with North Korea, more sober minds, like that of Joshua Stanton, have been decidedly pessimistic. I think I lean more toward Joshua, in this instance, than I do toward Styx. When it comes to anything North Korea-related, it's always good to take any news with a truckload of salt. In Joshua's latest post, "The Trump-Kim Pact was a con by both men. We’re the marks," Joshua argues:

WHEN I FIRST WROTE ABOUT THE TRUMP-KIM NON-AGGRESSION PACT, I expressed pessimism but reserved judgment until I knew more about its vague terms. I now wonder if history will record it as the most disastrous international agreement since Molotov-Ribbentrop, one that will put the U.S., South Korea, and Japan forever under the shadow of North Korean nuclear blackmail, forever break the global nonproliferation regime, mark the beginning of the end of South Korea’s experiment with liberal democracy, and put us on the path to an inevitable war that could draw in China or Russia. The latest revelation is that Trump’s talk of complete denuclearization before North Korea gets any concessions may have been little more than that—empty talk.

[...]

No doubt, the nonproliferation twitterers—who don’t know enough about North Korea to understand what it wants nukes for, don’t know why allowing it to keep “just a few nukes” isn’t acceptable, and can’t grasp that its signatures mean nothing—will cheer. But from where I sit, Trump’s North Korea policy just went from the least-bad of my lifetime to easily the most dangerously weak. Much like its predecessors, Agreed Framework III is neither an agreement nor a framework, but a stalling tactic, a sanctions wedge, and a means to extort more incremental concessions to consolidate Pyongyang’s creeping hegemony over Seoul. From Pyongyang’s perspective, it’s working perfectly.

[...]

That Pyongyang would renege was so predictable that some of us predicted it, though this required no clairvoyance and only a cursory understanding of history. Agreed Framework I lasted five years before we learned that Pyongyang had built an undisclosed uranium enrichment program, and not even President Clinton could certify Pyongyang’s compliance with it. Agreed Framework II lasted for about a year and a half before Kim Jong-il balked at verification and even the New York Times declared it a dead letter. The 2005 Joint Statement lasted less than a day before Kim Jong-il declared that it was all conditioned on the completion of two light-water reactors. Barack Obama’s Leap Day Deal lasted about two weeks before Kim Jong-un announced a missile test. Pyongyang’s promises have short half-lives.

Sigh...