What was it?
North Korea
- Thread starter Raoul
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In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik (@Rood) is joined by CEO Duncan Drasdo and Financial Director Andy Green from the Manchester United Supporters Trust for a special episode on all things behind the scenes at Old Trafford including a brief history of MUST and their aims today, views on INEOS and Sir Jim Ratcliffe so far, and the Old Trafford regeneration.
He bankrupted a casino. Four times.
Didn’t say he was a particularly good one
I’m just pointing that out to show how bad his “angle” might be.Didn’t say he was a particularly good one
That the beaches would be a perfect place for Condos and Hotels. Some took it as a joke but he and his family would love to have a Trump Tower in NK
Just read it. I’m sure he would though.In all seriousness, seeing his rhetoric he’s obviously in it to paint himself as some sort of heroic figure. Someone to go down in history as the American hero who brought peace to the ever warring Korean state.
Kim is probably taking him for a ride though, after which Trump will do an imediate 180 back to his rocket man rethoric.
Hope he proves me wrong, bit I’ve neem hurt before.
Whatever else your opinion of him, Trump deserves a lot of credit for this.
Well... yeah. It seems like it was his idea.
Only if it eventually results in anything meaningful. As of yet nothing other than a symbolic meeting has been achieved.
I'm increasingly of the belief this entire thing will blow up by way of Trump or one of his nutty assistants saying something over Twitter or in the media. The South are clearly uncomfortable with Trump's unilateral stopping of training.
Does he though? He’s legitimised Kim, conceded on US military exercises, and in return for what?
But that’s not true. Trump conceded a firm detail - exercises - in return for woolly language.
A reduced chance of Nuclear war.
Erm... no. No agreement on nukes has been reached.
Kim is a cartoon villain. You can't legislate for what he'll do next. But getting him to the table is a big deal.
Trump might be a terrible human being in a lot of ways, but it doesn't hurt to have some perspective about what he does in a positive sense.
Then by your own logic, he's conceded nothing and your previous point is invalid.
He appears to have unilaterally conceded joint military exercises in return for no new testing - something quite expedient for NK given that they recently incapacitated their primary nuclear testing site. He's also gone some way to normalising the leader of one of the most brutal regimes on earth and obfuscated such a regime as "rough, lots of places are rough."
Eh? trump conceded on military exercises. In return he got no concession on nukes. So long as NK has nukes, there is no reduced chance of nuclear war. The US position has been that a nuclear armed NK is completely unacceptable to the US. That is the basic calculus in the likeihood of a nuclear war and it is unchanged.
Yeah, not the smartest thing to say.
No, Getting Kim to the table was EASY. They’ve wanted a summit with the US president for years. The US presidents never gave it because once that prestige is conferred, it’s gone as a bargaining chip. It’s why summits usually happen when a deal is ready, or the framework of a deal is agreed, eg the SALT talks between the US and the soviets.
The idiot Trump gave them a ton of what they’ve always wanted, in exchange for feck all.
Now Iran are looking on thinking ‘them nukes really are useful’.
Now Iran are looking on and thinking, why are North Korea being rewarded for doing nothing to reduce their nukes, but we are being punished for reducing ours?
He'll u-turn on that the minute they step out of line thats bollocks. No different to saying NK have conceded complete denuclearization. Its a worthless peice of paper
Define “working towards”.
Well yeah, they will be thinking ‘we really want to get on with building those nukes then America will take us seriously’.
Another argument says the reason the NK are being so apparently reasonable is because they can’t test and develop new nukes at the moment becaus their facilities collapsed. So they need time to fix that. “Working towards” is time buying language, the sort of thing you say when you might want to commit to something but you aren’t quite ready to, or don’t want to. Practical problems can easily be the enemy of timeliness, especially invented ones.
Why? I'm not arguing that it isn't loose language just that such an initial agreement doesn't need to be anything else. You're acting as if this is a one shot attempt the result of years rather than weeks.
The threats if they don't still remain, flexibility remains. All thats happened is a new page has been turned (hopefully). They've tried the other way and got no progress, if a more open route works great
Not if they can't reach American soil they wont. Not under Trump anyway.
All that’s happened is trumps signalled his puppy dog keenness to do a deal, any deal. So what incentive does NK now have to give the US what it wants? He’s signalled he’s likely to settle for much less than previous administrations would have settled for. At the same time, what have trumps threats really amounted to? Bluster.
So...the North Korean nuclear test site at Punggye-ri collapsed after various nuclear tests and earthquakes and they needed to construct a new one so they blew up the entrances to the already useable site and allowed the world’s journalists to film it, which they then used as a huge publicity stunt allowing them to pretend that they were stopping testing nuclear missiles. Of course they were stopping testing them temporarily anyway because they needed to build another suitable test site.
This did however give them an opportunity to mislead the world, get a meeting with Trump on a false pretext and work towards getting troops out of SK and sanctions lifted. All for conceding nothing, except for completely trashing what was an already unusable test site. Congrats to Kim & Co for turning a situation to their advantage. Probably suggested to him by Russia/China. Now let’s hope Trump & Co switch their heads on before they make absolute fools of themselves by actually trusting this new found friend.
Like the idea of Kim visiting the USA though....they could always arrest him once he’s arrived.
This did however give them an opportunity to mislead the world, get a meeting with Trump on a false pretext and work towards getting troops out of SK and sanctions lifted. All for conceding nothing, except for completely trashing what was an already unusable test site. Congrats to Kim & Co for turning a situation to their advantage. Probably suggested to him by Russia/China. Now let’s hope Trump & Co switch their heads on before they make absolute fools of themselves by actually trusting this new found friend.
Like the idea of Kim visiting the USA though....they could always arrest him once he’s arrived.
It's quite astonishing that Trump hadn't apparently talked about cessation of exercises with Seoul prior to the talks, especially as it seems to be the only concrete item to result from them. If I were a South Korean leader today I would be considering chucking a a few billion on a feasibility study as to how quick and how expensive it would be for them to develop their own nuclear weapons. They could easily afford to do so. At the very least it would teach Trump not to take them for granted in future.
I'm closer to your view than most on here, which is expectedly cynical, but it's just not true that getting him to the table was a big deal. They have wanted a meeting with the US president for literally decades.
I don't think Trump gave up ground he shouldn't have though - North Korea's strategy was clearly effective. From this position it is a step in the right direction from both sides but that's all it is. There's been plenty of those before.
He will forget he ever said that.
Don't you get? Trump has unilaterally stopped the excercises while NK have given no timeframe on denuclearisation. Furthermore, Trump has no way if verification. I guess we'll know in the coming months.
There’s no reason to trust either NKs willingness, or trumps ability, to do a deal. We just aren’t far enough into this process to be more than skeptical. Anything more is naive, at this point. That might change, but I’m not buying the PR spin around all this. It’s a weak opening from trump and those of us old enough to remember the the painstaking way SALT talks were handled are right to be cautious.
They should've commissioned Tarantino to make a short film about the two of them.