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US National Archives and Records Administration<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Well, the \u201cwow\u201d over North Korea has tuned into a \u201cwhoa\u201d today and tonight (early Friday now).<\/p>\n Great, the worst aspects of ditching the Iran deal may now play out with the worst things that can happen with North Korea. Or maybe all will still work out. Maybe the \u201cestablished\u201d way that all the wags promote that has never worked with North Korea now will. With Kim and Trump, good luck. The point is that the message of \u201cnuke-up\u201d all around the world just got a new push. We\u2019d say good luck to all of us on that count, but if that happens, KYA goodbye.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, to underline our Issue and Message from May 10, the Kristof\/Dowd doctrine could arguably now be declared proven science.<\/p>\n We may now be closer than ever to just blowing up the planet, but how did the TV news cover it?<\/p>\n ABC and CBS at least ran it as the headline story with some follow-through.<\/p>\n NBC, still making up for trying to silence Ronan Farrow before he won the Pulitzer Prize, ran the Weinstein looks like he drew the monopoly go straight to jail card (richly deserved) story as the lead. Was the idea to take a serious story and make it look like lurid entertainment before we all go up in nuclear flames? Related side stories about what celebrity goes on what show to talk about a related story\u2013well, welcome once again to the vomitorium and why we got here, but we\u2019re not going to go there. Did we say a network was making up for something? No the network that brought us the dumbed-down reality show that launched a presidency is just doing the normal thing entertainment owned news does\u2013going for dollars.<\/p>\n PBS NewHour was the standout as usual. Lead story and in-depth on whether we\u2019ll all be ashes soon.<\/p>\n The cable stations? As Kristoff and Dowd already pointed out in our May 10 post\u2013Duh (re-posted below). The days Anderson Cooper was in the lead nightly taking us to all the real places and underlying stories on the planet about hungry children and\u00a0child trafficking and genocide and wars taking countless lives and making millions of refugees with the likes of Kristof in tow are long gone. Just go back and read the May 10 post below. It was approximately half an hour in before prime time CNN shows talked about North Korea, and simiar fare on other cable stations, adjusted by ideological perspective per network for the money-paying audience. Bread and Circus.<\/p>\n For the crucial importance of what happened today, there is no better source than\u00a0Nicholas Kristof. Scour his previous articles on North Korea as well. He\u2019s been there, and all over this story for some time. Here\u2019s his piece from today:<\/p>\n \u201cTrump\u2019s Relationship With North Korea Just Got More Dangerous.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n By Nicholas Kristof, Opinion Columnist, May 24, 2018<\/p>\n Now we enter a more dangerous period in relations with North Korea.<\/p>\n President Trump topped a particularly inept diplomatic period by canceling his meeting with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un. The previous policy of maximum economic pressure on North Korea may no longer be viable, so the risk is that Trump ends up reaching for the military toolbox.<\/p>\n As every president since Nixon \u2014 except for Trump \u2014 has realized, the military options are too dangerous to employ. That\u2019s even more true today, when North Korea apparently has the capacity to use nuclear, chemical and biological weapons against Seoul, Tokyo and perhaps Los Angeles. Yet Pentagon officials seem deeply nervous that Trump doesn\u2019t realize this and has a Kim-like appetite for brinkmanship in ways that create risks of a cataclysm.<\/p>\n It was at least a relief that Trump, in calling off the direct talks, didn\u2019t slam the door on diplomacy. \u201cI feel it is inappropriate, at this time, to have this long-planned meeting,\u201d he wrote Kim in a letter, in a tone more of regret than of anger. He added, \u201cSome day, I very much look forward to meeting you.\u201d<\/p>\n He noted that South Korea and Japan were \u201cready should foolish or reckless acts be taken by North Korea.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump apparently canceled both because of recent North Korean belligerent rhetoric, including denunciations of Vice President Mike Pence, and because it grew clear that North Korea wasn\u2019t planning on giving up its nuclear weapons any time soon. There was some political risk that Trump would look foolish reaching a general agreement with North Korea that was much less significant and onerous than the one he tore up with Iran.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The Trump statement leaves open the possibility that South Korea\u2019s president, Moon Jae-in, who has been the crucial figure in the peace process, can put Humpty Dumpty back together again, so that a meeting could be held later this year. Indeed, if the cancellation now leads to working-level talks between American and North Korean officials, that would be progress.<\/p>\n The risk, though, is that we\u2019re back to confrontation.<\/p>\n I hope that North Korea will respond to Trump\u2019s letter in similarly measured, calm terms. But no one has ever made money betting on North Korean calmness.<\/p>\n North Korea could decide to create a new crisis, perhaps by conducting a missile test or an atmospheric nuclear test. If an atmospheric test were conducted in the northern Pacific, it could send radiation toward the U.S. and would be perceived in Washington as a great provocation.<\/p>\n Likewise, the U.S. could respond to new tensions by sending B-1 bombers off the coast of North Korea. If North Korea scrambled aircraft or fired antiaircraft missiles, we could very quickly have an enormous escalation.\u00a0So look out. We may be headed for a game of chicken, with Trump and Kim at the wheel. And all the rest of us are in the back seat.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In any case, it will be difficult for Trump to return to his policy of strangling North Korea economically. China has already been quietly relaxing sanctions, and South Korea may not have the stomach for strong sanctions, either. Kim has met with the leaders of both China and South Korea in recent months, building ties and reducing his isolation, and I expect he\u2019ll continue the outreach to both countries.<\/p>\n Some Republicans have praised Trump for his North Korea diplomacy, and there\u2019s been talk about him winning a Nobel Peace Prize. That was always ludicrous, and his North Korea policy is in fact a fine example of ineptitude.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s what actually happened.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s jingoistic rhetoric didn\u2019t particularly intimidate North Korea, but it terrified South Korea, which feared it would be collateral damage in a new Korean War. So President Moon shrewdly used the Olympics to undertake a careful peace mission to bring the U.S. and North Korea together, flattering each side to make this happen (Moon is a world-class Trump flatterer, and other leaders around the world have noted his success). This was commendable on Moon\u2019s part; he\u2019s the one who genuinely did have a shot at the peace prize.<\/p>\n As I wrote at the time<\/a>, however, it was a mistake when Trump rashly accepted the idea of a summit meeting without any careful preparations. The risk of starting a diplomatic process with a face-to-face session is that if talks collapse at the top, then it\u2019s difficult to pick up at a lower level. That\u2019s precisely what ended up happening, and this dynamic creates greater risk than ever of military conflict.<\/p>\n With different aides, Trump might have pulled it off. While Trump and his fans were always deluded about the possibility that North Korea would soon hand over its nuclear weapons, there was some possibility of a general statement about starting a dialogue about denuclearization. North Korea would destroy some intercontinental ballistic missiles, tensions would drop, and we\u2019d all be better off even if denuclearization never actually happened. Yes, Trump would have been played, but the world would still have benefited from the peace process.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Yet John Bolton, Trump\u2019s national security adviser, spoke up in ways calculated to unnerve the North Koreans, by talking about the Libya model. When you cite as a model a country whose leader ended up being executed by his own people, that\u2019s not usually persuasive to another dictator. On my most recent visit to North Korea<\/a>, in September, officials cited the Libyan experience as one reason they needed to hold on to their nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n North Korean leaders themselves responded to Bolton\u2019s comments with harsh, over-the-top rhetoric, including the comment about Pence. This was a major miscalculation on their part, escalating the ineptitude and helping to kill plans for talks with Trump.<\/p>\n While the North Koreans didn\u2019t get the summit meeting they wanted, they have managed the process quite well. They used the rush of diplomacy to rebuild ties with Beijing and start discussions about economic integration with South Korea, and to moderate their international image. They\u2019ve also created something of a wedge between Washington and Seoul, as was apparent in the response<\/a> to Trump\u2019s cancellation by a South Korean government spokesman: \u201cWe are attempting to make sense of what, precisely, President Trump means.\u201d<\/p>\n In weighing the risks ahead, commentators sometimes note that Kim is rational and doesn\u2019t want to commit suicide. That\u2019s true, but it doesn\u2019t particularly encourage me. Rational actors regularly make awful decisions. Saddam Hussein wasn\u2019t suicidal, and neither was George W. Bush, but they both acted in ways in Iraq that were catastrophic.<\/p>\n Both Trump and Kim would still like to make a summit happen. So I\u2019m hoping for the best, but fearing for the worst.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n 5.10.17:<\/p>\n In the Sunday Review of The New York Times last Sunday, there was a double-barreled blast from two of the most well-known and widely-read op-ed columnists on the planet (and two of our favorites as all readers have seen for years on these pages), Nicholas Kristof and Maureen Dowd.<\/p>\n Their blasts were at the media. As any long-time readers know, we\u2019ve been blasting similarly for decades.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s Kristof in \u201cOur Addiction To Trump\u201d<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cWe in the commentariat complain about President Trump, but we\u2019re locked in a symbiotic relationship with him.<\/p>\n News organizations, especially cable television channels, feed off Trump \u2014 like oxpeckers on a rhino\u2019s back \u2014 for he is part of our business model in 2018. As long as our focus is on Trump, audiences follow.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not optimal to have as president an authoritarian who denounces journalists as enemies of the people, but he has given us a sense of mission and a \u201cTrump bump.\u201d Every time he denounces us we get more subscriptions. \u2026<\/p>\n In America today, it\u2019s all Trump, all the time. We\u2019re collectively addicted to him. The nonstop scandals and outrages suck us in; they amount to Trump porn.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n As president, Trump is enormously important, but there\u2019s so much else happening as well. Some 65,000 Americans will die this year of drug overdoses, American life expectancy has fallen for two years in a row, guns claim a life every 15 minutes and the number of uninsured is rising again<\/a> even as a child in the U.S. is 70 percent more likely to die<\/a> before adulthood than one in other advanced nations. Those issues are rather more important than the question of whether Stormy Daniels slept with Trump.<\/p>\n Or look abroad. In Myanmar, the government is engaging in what many believe to be a genocide against the Rohingya minority<\/a>. Gaza is erupting, and there\u2019s heightened threat of a new war in the Middle East. The U.S. has been complicit in Saudi Arabian war crimes in Yemen<\/a>. The carnage in Syria continues.<\/p>\n The world\u2019s progress against malaria, which kills almost one person a minute, has stalled<\/a>. A fifth of children under 5 worldwide are stunted from malnutrition. Bill Gates and others warn <\/a>that one of our top risks is a pandemic for which we are ill prepared.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Progressive snobs like me bemoan Trump\u2019s inattention to these global issues, but the truth is that we don\u2019t pay attention, either. At cocktail parties, on cable television, at the dinner table, at the water cooler, all we talk about these days is Trump. So we complain about Trump being insular and parochial \u2014 but we\u2019ve become insular and parochial as well. We\u2019ve caught the contagion that we mock.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Actually, to be more precise, they (the media) and we, and our society and all it\u2019s ills created Trump, and other such reactions globally. The news media is not news, it\u2019s been a corporate entertainment complex for years. If it were as simple as Trump being the issue, by the way, those in the media who most attack him have been serving effectively as agent provocateurs for his election and re-election, consciously or unconsciously in emotional-holic delirium, as Kristof more or less observes. The result is that his approval rating has risen to the highest he\u2019s had, 44 percent. For those who don\u2019t know, that\u2019s where Obama was as he approached the mid-term election in his first term. Except he started much higher and kept going down\u2013Trump started much lower and is going up. As he is fond of saying, \u201cwe\u2019ll see\u201d what\u2019s next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n