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Headlines following the failed negotiations with North Korea often gave kudos to the President for being willing to walk away. After a few Democrats, including Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, gave lukewarm but tangible credit to the President for not making a bad deal, some anti-Trump publications followed suit and painted the non-deal as a positive result of the trip.
Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro was having none of it.
Trump should be grateful for Cohen distracting everyone from the massive moral and diplomatic debacle that just unfolded in Vietnam.
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) February 28, 2019
And don't give me "the alternative was nuclear war"! No, it absolutely was and is not. Face-to-face meetings with gulag-masters without any pre-negotiation are amateur hour. Flattering a man who murders American citizens and his own relatives impunity is unconscionable.
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) February 28, 2019
I've said for two years that Trump's sycophancy-for-denuclearization strategy was high-risk, high-reward — and that if it failed, it was utter foolishness. Supporters of the strategy assured Americans that this was all part of the plan. Obviously, it wasn't.
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) February 28, 2019
My Take
There is absolutely no reason to have a summit like this if the very basic premise behind it – the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula – had not been hammered out beforehand. It’s inexcusable, as Shapiro noted, that they should have had to walk away from a deal when it could have been known up front there would be no deal worth discussing.
Had they held discussions in private beforehand and established the non-negotiables, they would have known Kim Jong un was unwilling to completely abandon his nuclear weapon ambitions. That could have saved a lot of time, heartache, and jet fuel instead of learning once they made the trip that it was impossible from the outset.
What happened in North Korea is indicative of a foreign policy that’s shot from the hip. Making deals on the fly is a common tactic in business. It’s one of the techniques the President should never have brought over from his private life.
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