Amateurs & Professionals
The problem with hiring media personalities for important positions is that they express opinions in public:
In a statement published late Tuesday by the state-run Korea Central News Agency, Kim Kye Gwan, North Korea’s first vice minister of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, called Bolton’s comments indicative of “an awfully sinister move to impose on our dignified state the destiny of Libya or Iraq which had been collapsed due to yielding the whole of their countries to big powers.”
“It is absolutely absurd to dare compare (North Korea), a nuclear weapon state, to Libya which had been at the initial stage of nuclear development,” Kim said. “(The) world knows too well that our country is neither Libya nor Iraq which have met miserable fate.”
Singling out the national security adviser for personal criticism, Kim said that North Korea had “shed light on the quality of (John) Bolton already in the past, and we do not hide our feeling of repugnance towards him.”
Replacing General McMaster with John Bolton prior to opening negotiations with North Korea was an amateur move. Bolton has been bad-mouthing North Korea for years, and the Kims take notes . Kim Jong-un is not going to give up his nuclear weapons. They are his only guarantee that he won’t get wiped out like Qaddafi and Saddam.
2 comments
Mustang Bobby in his “Stockholm” post had it spot on: Kim played to Trump’s and Bolton’s egos and managed to turn the loss of his nuke test site into a win.
I don’t like the Kim regime but Kim managed to reveal, to the entire world, the fatuous fools in the white house for the imbeciles that they are.
Maybe they’ll win the noble Darwin award.
Trump may not understand it but unlilateral actions like withdrawing from the Paris climate accord,violating the Iran nuclear agreement, and moving the US embassy to Jerusalem made him a non-starter for the Nobel Prize. Jimmy Carter was instumental in the Camp David Accord between Egypt and Israel, but it was years and a lot more work before he received the Prize. Obama received the Prize because he wasn’t the Shrubbery.
North Korea and Iran believe that their security depends on nuclear weapons to protect themselves from the US, and I don’t see a convincing argument against that view given the actions against Iraq and Libya.