[PJ] When President Trump tipped reporters to expect a big announcement Thursday evening on North Korea, I joked to a friend that this could only amount to good news in the unlikely event that North Korean tyrant Kim Jong Un had just sent Trump a note saying "Help! I want to defect!"No such luck. Instead, Kim has asked President Trump for a meeting as soon as possible, and Trump has agreed to meet with Kim by May.
This plan is now being widely hailed as a historic step forward; a triumph for Trump's campaign of coralling Pyongyang with "maximum pressure." It's historic all right, but there's an enormous hazard that it's a step right into the same old North Korean trap.
North Korea has a record of deceit that includes not only the series of broken nuclear deals over the past 24 years, but the surprise invasion of South Korea way back in 1950, with which Kim Jong Un's grandfather, founding tyrant Kim Il Sung, triggered the 1950-53 Korean War. The totalitarian character of the regime itself -- a system built on brute force, threats and lies -- ought to warn us that Kim's goal in proposing a summit is not to surrender to maximum pressure, but to deflate it, via assorted diplomatic stunts. All the better for Kim to regroup and carry on with North Korea's predatory projects, global rackets and nuclear missile program. (Forget the idea that Kim might be suddenly looking to repent of his murderous ways and scrap his totalitarian system; odds are, his own grotesquely abused citizenry would seize the chance to kill him.)