This is … good? Fuck Trump, don’t vote for him, but diplomacy is good. Progressives should be advocating for an end to our economic warfare against the people of NK, and attitudes like this are moving in that direction.
In other cases? Perhaps. There is the famous story of Boris Yeltsin visiting the US in 1989, visiting a grocery store, and realizing that capitalism was superior (honestly the whole thing never smelled right to me and I’ve never seen a direct quote from Yeltsin about it, but whatever). I’m sure there are other cases where normalizing relations and sharing culture has helped to ease tensions.
Kim Jong Un doesn’t need any of that. He grew up and went to school in Switzerland. He’s a huge fan of basketball and American movies. He is familiar with American culture already. North Korea’s hostilities aren’t about competing ideology, but about Kim Jong Un maintaining power by carefully maintaining a balance between his own military leaders, China and (to a lesser extent) Russia versus the US, South Korea, and their allies. It’s in China’s interest right now to have a belligerent puppet state who is annoying to the west without actually escalating to war. Until those geopolitics change, taking Kim Jong Un to see America’s least favorite past time is only promoting and encouraging authoritarianism.
Given that Yeltsin would proceed to coup the USSR and bring back capitalism, decreasing life expectancy by 20 years, which it has barely recovered from, immiserating the entire country, causing widespread famine, and paving the way for Putin, you could have picked a better example.
I meant in terms of establishing good diplomatic relations between the US and Russia. From the fall of the Berlin wall up until the Obama administration it looked like relations were steadily improving as Russia was becoming more capitalist. Also at least from the US perspective it’s probably the most famous case of exposing a hostile foreign diplomat to American values.
I remember reading articles about how Russia was giving away land and paying people to come populate their rural eastern provinces. I’m not sure exactly when the sentiment changed- Putin clearly didn’t like Obama, but at this moment I can’t remember any specific incidents pior to the Crimea invasion. Before that, I remember them being seen as an economically inferior, but developing, potential ally. Similar to Japan before it’s “miracle”, lumped into BRIC with Brazil, India, and China as a potential new place to do business.
As for Yeltsin being bad for Russians? Eh, probably. I’m content leaving discussion to those whose special interest is recent Russian history.
I remember them being seen as an economically inferior, but developing
In the 70s, they were comparable with the US. It cannot be overstated how disastrous the 90s were; imagine if overnight the entire population of the US was reduced to the economic conditions of India.
A warm relationship with the US was premised on the immiseration of the Russian people for the benefit of international capital, with the Russian national bourgeoisie eventually joining them, but the specifics are a bit more complicated.
I can’t remember any specific incidents pior to the Crimea invasion
The coup in Ukraine, where the US supported right-wing factions hostile to Russia in the newly formed government was the immediate incident prior to that.
This chapter of The Shock Doctrine does a great job of covering the US policy maker’s actions and their perspectives during the 90s and 2010s:
https://archive.org/details/fp_Naomi_Klein-The_Shock_Doctrine/page/n251/mode/2up
Trump foreign policy:
-1 Increasing sanctions on Cuba
-1 Increasing drone strikes in the middle east and Africa
-1 Not enforcing Minsk II
-1 stealing Iranian tanker
-1 Blowing up the guy who beat ISIS, while he was on a peace mission in a third country
+1 Calling off the war with Iran at the last hour
+1 threatening to leave NATO
-1 increasing funding for NATO
+1 Afghanistan withdrawal agreement
-1 escalating trade war with China
I can’t give him one for North Korea since it didn’t result in anything but a silly photo where Trump salutes some random north Korean soldier.
edit: What are the downvotes for? Does anyone disagree with my analysis? Is there someone out there chomping at the bit for war with Afghanistan, Iran, China, and Russia and starving Cubans?
I think some people have problems with your evaluation of the last few points.
I’m not gonna give him credit for calling off the war with Iran, since it was his own stupid decisions that got us there.
There are a lot of NATO fans here, so you’re catching flak for the +/- evaluation on both of those points.
The withdrawal from Afghanistan was a goddamn trainwreck, so I don’t think he should get points for that. Not entirely his fault, because the actual exodus didn’t happen under his watch, but his timeline certainly didn’t set his successor up for success.
But in general, saying anything even vaguely complementary towards Orange Julius is gonna earn you some downvotes around here.
I’m not gonna give him credit for calling off the war with Iran, since it was his own stupid decisions that got us there.
It’s still -1 on Iran, blowing up Soleimani was insane.
The withdrawal from Afghanistan was a goddamn trainwreck
In 2010, the Afghani people had 3 problems, the US, Kabul, and the Taliban.
Now they have 1 problem. It was bound to be this way since the day we went in and gave the people a bigger problem than the Taliban. Kabul wasn’t even part of the negotiations.
A convicted felon wants to take the guy that has children executed for listening to music to a baseball game. What a dream team.
Generally if you hear something that makes no sense about an enemy of the US, it’s either outright fabricated or missing vital context.
Like the trash story from a couple months ago was missing the context that South Korea has been sending balloons that littered North Korea with leaflets beforehand.
You’re right. Maybe the kids in OPs post had been warned already to stop listening to music. They probably instigated and escalated the situation.
Come on, what’s more likely, that North Koreans are literally cartoon villains who execute children for listening to music (when they’re not pretending to till the fake fields around the fake village at the border, pretending to play in the fake water park, or pulling the trains from village to village)? Or that some tabloid made it up, and nobody bothers to fact check anything about north korea?
You’d recognize how silly it is if a conservative told you “<enemy of america> hates us for our freedom”, why don’t you see it here?
I think both scenarios are 100% plausible. If conservatives made those claims about a political enemy, I’d look at the body of evidence that enemy has produced, and make some judgement calls. NK has a shit track record of being good to its citizens. There are videos of defectors getting shot, stories of political prisoners or just prisoners being tortured and killed, some from the United States, and mountains of other individual acts that show them them as radicals that may kill kids just because.
stories of political prisoners or just prisoners being tortured and killed
Similar to Cuban refugees, they can literally get thrown in prison or executed as agents of an enemy state if they say positive things about Korea.
Journalists paying defectors to share a story would be considered wildly unethical in any other circumstance, but it’s par for the course for north Korean defectors.
The wild stories about rats eating children and children eating rats in camps they torture you for 7 generations is like the definition of non-credible.
Sure, take him to one in Cuba.
Trump getting charged for violating the sanctions he put on Cuba would be really funny.
Cool, save a seat for Hannibal Lecter!
I mean I don’t like Trump at all but he’s very obviously kidding every time he does the Hannibal Lector reference (he makes this one pun over and over about “having you for dinner,” laughs, uses a sarcastic tone, and notes how the media gets upset) and he was pretty clearly kidding with the baseball comment too.
He only starts joking about it after he gets called out as a nutbag. This is how he plays it off.
But there’s no way to make his comments not make sense here— he talks about insane asylums, then brings up an iconic fictional insane person
