The President’s newest pen pal has sent him another letter:
U.S. President Donald Trump, center, displays what appears to be a three-page letter from North Korean leader Kim Jong-un during a cabinet meeting at the White House on Wednesday. Without elaborating on its contents, Trump said he looks forward to meeting with Chairman Kim in the not-too-distant future. A poster reading “Sanctions are Coming November” was put on the desk in front of Trump. Acting Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt, left, and acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, right, listen to Trump. [AP/YONHAP]
U.S. President Donald Trump said that he is ready to help North Korea reach its “tremendous economic potential” after revealing Wednesday at the White House that he received a letter from the North’s leader Kim Jong-un.
“I just got a great letter from Kim Jong-un,” Trump told reporters at his first Cabinet meeting of the new year. He displayed what appeared to be a three-page letter without elaborating its content, which he said he has shown to only a “few people.”
In his New Year’s address Tuesday, Kim said he is ready to meet with Trump again “anytime.” Kim reiterated his commitment to “complete denuclearization” and pledged that North Korea will not make, test, use or proliferate nuclear weapons.
“We had our meeting six months [ago] in Singapore,” said Trump, recalling his first summit with Kim on June 12. “We’ll probably now have another meeting. He’d like to meet, I’d like to meet.”
“I look forward to our meeting with Chairman Kim,” said Trump. “We’ll be setting it up in the not-too-distant future.”
The contents of the letter were not released, but I am willing to bet it is just more of the same empty promises that are part of the Kim regime’s “pretend denuclearization” strategy.
So I am to believe that the Kim regime is so poor that they need the international community to provide them humanitarian assistance, but some how they have enough funds to support this?:
The 105-story Ryugyong Hotel has long been a blot on the Pyongyang skyline. The world’s tallest unoccupied building has towered over North Korea’s capital since 1987, a grand but empty pyramid entirely dark except for the lone aircraft warning light at its top. Outsiders saw the unfinished building as the epitome of failure, while people inside the country took care to rarely mention it at all. That is, until light designer Kim Yong Il made the building once again the talk of the town. In a brilliant flip of the script, the Ryugyong has been reborn as a symbol of pride and North Korean ingenuity. For several hours each night, the building that doesn’t have electricity inside becomes the backdrop of a massive light show in which more than 100,000 LEDs flash images of famous statues and monuments, bursts of fireworks, party symbols and political slogans.
This photo, captured from North Korean state TV, shows leader Kim Jong-un delivering a New Year’s address on Jan. 1, 2019.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un said Tuesday he is firmly committed to denuclearization and ready to meet with U.S. President Donald Trump at any time, but warned he could seek an alternative course if the U.S. misjudges his patience and sticks to sanctions. Kim made the remarks during his New Year’s speech broadcast by the country’s state television, also urging the U.S. to take corresponding measures in exchange for denuclearization steps the communist nation has taken so far. Kim also said he is willing to reopen the now shuttered inter-Korean industrial park in the North’s border city of Kaesong and resume a suspended tour program to Mount Kumgang on the North’s east coast “without any preconditions.” That could suggest Kim wants the resumption of the two projects as sanctions relief from the U.S. “I am always ready to sit down again with the U.S. president at any time and will make efforts to produce an outcome that the international community would welcome,” Kim said. “(But) we could be left with no choice but to seek a new way if the U.S. does not make good on its promises, misjudges our patience, while seeking to force things unilaterally and clinging to sanctions and pressure,” he said.
You can read more at the link, but the Kim regime is hoping they can get the second meeting with President Trump where Kim Jong-un can convince him to drop the sanctions on the Kaesong Industrial Park and the Mt. Kumgang Resort for superficial and easily reversible concessions that we have seen before.
Dropping of sanctions would allow a surge of investment in North Korea that will line the pockets of the Kim regime that they can then use to further develop their nuclear and other weapons programs. The only real concessions from North Korea that I believe would warrant dropping of any sanctions is when they release a complete list of their nuclear sites, allow inspections, and begin shipping nuclear material out of the country. I have seen no indications the Kim regime is even considering this.
Just another example of the hypocrisy from North Korea. The only reason the Japanese are going all in on missile defense is because the threat from the Kim regime. Just last year the North Koreans fired a missile over Japan:
North Korea’s state media on Saturday criticized Japan for conducting a test of a new missile interceptor system, which is being co-funded by the United States and Japan, arguing that the move could chill the “peace atmosphere” on the Korean Peninsula. The U.S. and Japan have jointly developed the SM-3 Block IIA interceptor, and they successfully conducted a test of the new interceptor in Hawaii earlier this month. In an English-language commentary, the North’s Korean Central News Agency said, “Japan’s incitement of the bellicose atmosphere is a serious act of harassing peace to chill the peace atmosphere on the Korean peninsula and the region and strain the situation.” “It is the revelation of the crafty trick of the Japanese reactionaries to further ratchet up the tension on the Korean peninsula and meet their own interests,” the commentary said.
I saw this image at naver cafe. It was taken in South Korea. But I think – South Korean did not make this. It is an reasonable doubt. Because South Korean start studying English in elementary school. Who made it, he or she is not South Korean or not study in South Korea. pic.twitter.com/sYGkiNpiMY
NK didn’t pursue nukes to achieve deterrence; it used its deterrence to pursue nukes. Nukes as purely defensive is nonsense, as is the Libya canard NK throws out and the West holds tightly like a security blanket to rationalize NK’s nuclear ambition. NK’s intentions are coercive. https://t.co/6iwYbfZflR
Long time Korea watcher and a ROK Drop favorite Donald Kirk has an article in the Daily Beast that claims that the Moon administration’s North Korea policies may be derailed by the rise of the Korean right:
The resurgence of the right automatically jeopardizes such dreams as the pendulum of public opinion, in the pattern of modern Korean history, shows unmistakable signs of shifting yet again.
It’s assumed that, partly for that reason, Kim did not respond to President Moon’s entreaties to please come to Seoul this month. The fact is no North Korean leader has visited the South Korean capital since Kim Jong Un’s grandfather, Kim Il Sung, was said to have gone to Seoul after his troops overran the capital at the outset of the Korean War. Three South Korean presidents have visited Pyongyang—Kim Dae-jung in June 2000, Roh Moo-hyun, whom Moon accompanied as his chief of staff in October 2007, and then Moon in September. Violence surrounding a visit to Seoul by the North Korean leader is no paranoid apparition as the opposition threatens to call for his overthrow and death. Defying rows of policemen, they also shout imprecations against their own President Moon. Rightist foes of both Moon and North Korea promise a mass outpouring of protests if Kim ever shows up in Seoul. Under the circumstances, an official at the Blue House, the presidential office and residence complex, told me Kim and his omnipresent bodyguards had to be worried about security.
You can read more at the link, but if Kim Jong-un did show up I would hope there would be mass protests against someone that in recent years has ordered the murdering and wounding of dozens of ROK troops and civilians. Plus his regime still keeps hundreds of kidnapped South Koreans detained in North Korea.
As much as President Moon tries, Kim Jong-un should never be considered a respectable world leader.
In N. Korea, we had 3 cards to play: – "maximum pressure" (then Trump dialed it back to "medium") – deterrence (then Trump canceled US-ROK exercises) – KJU's pariah status because of crimes against humanity (then Trump "fell in love" with him) He gave it all away for nothing. https://t.co/GJGiPTw4b2
I wish more people would take legal action for the crimes committed by the Kim regime:
The parents of Otto Warmbier, who died in a coma after being sent home from a North Korean labor prison, have demanded about $1.1 billion in compensation from Pyongyang.
According to a Voice of America (VOA) report on Tuesday, the legal team for the Warmbiers has submitted a document to a court that specified the amount they were going to claim against the North Korean regime for their son’s death. The calculation was based on a similar captivity case that led to the death of a missionary.
The largest portion was made up of punitive damages ― $1.05 billion ― with $350 million each for Warmbier and his parents, Cindy and Fred.
Someone in the media should ask President Moon what he thinks of the lawsuit launched by Otto Warmbier’s parents against North Korea? If the Moon administration is willing to support lawsuits against Japan for World War II era compensation, shouldn’t it be willing to support lawsuits against North Korea for compensation for crimes it committed now?
The Korea Times has a compilation of opinions from North Korean defectors on what they think about the current North Korean peace initiative:
Mikyung, female, escaped from North Korea in 2016 and arrived in 2016
I am amazed that South Koreans have high expectations that Kim Jung-un is seeking peace. It should be clear to anyone who understands the regime that it is seeking survival on its own terms, not to compromise. At last, more people are recognizing that he will not give up his nuclear weapons. The next realization needs to be that he won’t give up control of North Korea, that he will continue trying to exert complete control over everyone within North Korean territory and maybe even the entire Korean Peninsula.
We can see that even though he seems to be opening up, he still isn’t allowing North Koreans to talk with the outside world, to visit South Korea, or to even Skype with their elderly relatives in the South. It is a human tragedy, not just a North Korean tragedy.
South Koreans will be disappointed later when it is clear that he won’t change, and hopefully they will start to recognize that soon.
Eunji, female, escaped from North Korea in 2015, arrived in 2015
After I escaped to South Korea, I was shocked to learn that it was North Korea that had attacked South Korea in 1950. When I was in North Korea, I had learned the opposite, and so many other things that clearly were not true. There are some things that only North Korea believes. Sometimes it seems that South Koreans have been learning the North Korean version of history. I won’t be surprised if some South Koreans start insisting that it was South Korea that attacked North Korea.
And the people who are welcoming Kim Jung-un? They are crazy people. Some of my South Korean friends and colleagues have asked me about this, some of them even believe that I should welcome Kim Jung-un. I tell them, “Kim Jung-un’s supporters need to go to a mental hospital to have their brains checked. They need to live in North Korea, then they can learn what a real dictator is like.”
South Koreans hated Park Geun-hye, she was removed through the constitutional process and even jailed, so she was not a real dictator. But now the people who held candle-light vigils against President Park are now welcoming a real dictator? When I was in North Korea, I had an excuse for being ignorant about the outside world because I was taught only the truth according to the Kim family. If you live in South Korea, with so much information available everywhere, then you have no excuse.
You can read articles, books and even see videos showing both sides of an issue, instead of the situation of North Korea where only one side is presented. If Kim Jung-un truly changes and North Koreans can become free, then even I would welcome him. Before we can welcome Kim Jung-un, there needs to be truth about North Korea, there needs to be freedom for North Koreans. A murderer and dictator should not be welcomed as a hero.
She is absolutely right, anyone championing Kim Jong-un is not only crazy but should be considered treasonous considering how many South Koreans the Kim regime has murdered, injured, and kidnapped over the years that they have never been held responsible for.
You can read more opinions from North Korean defectors at the link.
