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Trump Cancels the North Korea Summit

Having thoroughly poisoned the atmosphere in the weeks leading up to the meeting, Bolton managed to sabotage diplomacy with North Korea with a minimum of effort.
bolton

After doing their best to antagonize North Korea over the last couple of weeks, the Trump administration is calling off the summit all together:

U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday called off a planned summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, even after North Korea followed through on a pledge to blow up tunnels at its nuclear test site.

Referring to a scheduled June 12 meeting with Kim in Singapore, Trump said in a letter to the North Korean leader: “Sadly, based on the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in your most recent statement, I feel it would be inappropriate, at this time, to have this long- planned meeting.”

Trump is responding to North Korea’s vehement objections to Pence’s “Libya model” rhetoric, which was just an echo of Trump’s own reckless rhetoric from last week. Bolton is probably very pleased that the Libya comparison had exactly the provocative and destructive effect that he surely intended it to have when he first started talking about it months ago. Having thoroughly poisoned the atmosphere in the weeks leading up to the meeting, Bolton managed to sabotage diplomacy with North Korea with a minimum of effort.

All things considered, it is probably better that the summit isn’t going to happen. It was a mistake to agree to the summit so hastily without doing any of the necessary preparation, and the public recriminations between the two sides over the last two weeks underscore how far apart the U.S. and North Korea remain on the main issues. Abruptly canceling the summit may undermine inter-Korean rapprochement in the short term, but going to the summit and then walking out on it–as administration officials kept promising they would do if their unrealistic demands weren’t met–would have done more damage.

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