They publicly and verifiably destroy these assets and they are likely to be serious, they avoid or fake doing this, and they have signaled that they have no intention of disarming, and are just stringing us along.

So, for instance, one show’s commentators complained, “what about human rights”? Trump didn’t get anything in the agreement about human rights. (I note no great concern by these various commentators, over the years, about the human rights situation in North Korea.)

Why this sudden concern?

Yeah, I’m sure that, right out of the gate, Trump was going to insist that any agreement contain some commitments by Kim to, say, release all of the Japanese citizens this regime has kidnapped and still holds, or that he is going to throw open the gates of all of his slave labor/re-education camps, and unless something like that is committed to by Kim. the whole deal is off.

This is obviously going to be a multi-session, multi-subject series of negotiations–ones that will likely take up various issues–one by one.

We Americans see the world through a lens of WWII: Heroic America saving freedom from tyranny by being the arsenal of democracy. Everything for us is free countries working together to fight oppressive regimes. That’s how we see ourselves, and that’s how we see the world.

Kim Jong Un certainly knows that point of view, with his Western education and media consumption. But his worldview is not based on the paradigm of tyrannical nations versus free nations. North Korea is, essentially, a large plantation full of slave labor.

Kim knows the U.S. is unlikely to attack. He’s also aware of what level of provocation would likely trigger us to do so. But the slaves on the plantation need to be afraid of what is off the plantation. He needs us to give a strong show of military force to keep his population in check. This is why he provokes us, and why his provocations are usually nonsensical and ridiculous. He doesn’t want us to take him seriously, he wants his people to take us seriously.

It’s been problematic over there for a few years. There have been defections, the country has obviously been hit hard economically. Kim can keep the country under his thumb with continued executions and punishments, but that can only continue so far. You can’t execute everybody, and even if you tried at some point some high-ranking official will execute you before you get them.

North Korea may simply have run out of other people’s money.

Trump certainly hasn’t made a deal with Kim, and it’s unlikely Kim has made a deal with Trump. They are both grade A jerks and until it’s written in stone, it isn’t written in stone. And even then it’s open for renegotiation. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was more on-again off-again posturing between Trump and Kim, just as there was leading up to the meeting. Although certainly they’ve both figured each other out already. Kim certainly knows Trump will drop him offhand if he doesn’t keep whatever end of the bargain they’ve made. The deal is still evolving and changing. Both sides are liable to suddenly back out, then back in.

The deal isn’t really about missiles, or bombers, or military exercises. It’s about Trump padding his resume with international diplomacy, and Kim looking good while he survives his nation’s internal turmoil.

Anyway, to sum up, what Kim needs from this meeting is not good propaganda to convince him. He needs a solution for North Korea’s future. He’s already as convinced as he’s going to get before the meeting ever got started. What he needs is bad propaganda he can sell to his own people “look at this great deal I got you”.

What the video really says is “Look, I’m a big time BS salesman PR guy who’s going to help you look good if you make this deal.” It’s the cheesiness that sells it.

Then what?

How to deal with millions of malnourished and starving (the average height and weight in North Korea is apparently far below normal), disease-ridden, traumatized people–the majority peasants–most of whom are ill-educated, and have never likely even encountered things like computers, the Internet, or cellphones.

How can you “integrate” them, turn them into productive, self-motivated citizens in a much more modern society and economy, and what will it cost–in terms of time, effort, and money–to do so?

(I am reminded of some of the Soviet Jews who immigrated to Israel, who complained of the burden that weighed on them of having to make a myriad of personal decisions for themselves, decisions that had formerly been made for them by the Communist regime. Reportedly, some apparently just couldn’t stand it, and returned to the “security” of Russia.)

According to TV reports, the North Korean nuclear/missile efforts are scattered among hundreds of structures–and that’s assuming that we know of and have identified all of them, which I find highly unlikely.

Notice, we are not even talking about the regime’s stores of chemical and biological weapons, or the infrastructure that manufactures, tests, transports, and stores them.

So far, I have seen no real, major, irreversible steps taken by the regime to disarm, and their blowing up what may have been an already unusable nuclear test site, witnessed by a handful of reporters, but not verified by those with the expertise and equipment to determine what exactly happened and what, exactly was blown up, looks to have been just a publicity stunt.

Talk of them decommissioning a missile plant doesn’t mean a thing, if they’ve got five or ten such plants hidden elsewhere.

Given how close the North Korean regime apparently is to achieving it’s goal of a deliverable nuclear warhead, I’d say that, if they are playing their old game of “negotiating” to give them the few more months necessary for them time to get to that goal, would should know that in short order.

If we are really willing to face the truth, and not just keep on “hoping” and fooling ourselves that they are, for once, sincere, we need to and should know the answer in weeks, rather than months.

Democrats and not a few Republicans in Congress, aided mightily by the MSM and various left wing “scientists” derided SDI as an unworkable, lunatic idea–science fiction, not fact–and down through the years since 1983 each year Democrats in Congress have fought tooth and nail against funding SDI, much less deploying, anything resembling a full, robust version of it, and have kept on whittling away at funds devoted to R & D on various bits and pieces of the program that did manage to survive their limitations and cuts to elements of the program; the place is littered with parts of SDI that have been killed off or “repurposed” in the process.

I pretty vividly recall one supposed “scientific analysis” back then that declared that programming and making work the several millions of lines of computer code likely needed for SDI battle management was simply impossible.

I note that devices like today’s standard household desktop computers and IPhones work because of the many millions of lines of code that direct them–far more than SDI was supposed to need to work.

So, the result?

What we have today is a patchwork of several systems or parts of systems that have managed to survive the Democrat’s efforts to kill and/or cripple SDI.

We have a few aging Early Warning Radars, we have a small number of a couple kinds of interceptor missiles–mostly ones geared to intercepting short and intermediate range theater ballistic missiles, like the PATRIOT and THAAD systems–and some to intercept longer range ICBMs, plus we have the ship based AEGIS system, that is also designed to intercept intermediate range missiles.

In terms of missiles designed specifically to intercept ICBMs, from what I understand, at this moment we have exactly 44 ground based interceptor missiles–split between the 40 deployed at Ft. Greeley in Alaska, and the 4 missiles deployed at Vandenberg AFB in California–that’s it.

Interceptor missiles that, as of 2017, the Pentagon rates as having “limited capability” against just a few simple ICBMS of the type that the North Koreans might be able to launch against us.

If we were attacked by a volley of many missiles, or missiles with sophisticated MIRV warheads and other penetration aids?

?????

Kim is a monster but I don’t see him as either suicidal or insane. So I can’t see him seriously contemplating a nuclear attack upon the US. Nor can I see him attacking S. Korea without absolute certainty that we will not come to the aid of S. Korea.

He cannot gain that certainty by targeting US cities as a deterrent. It didn’t work for the Soviets and I see no basis for Kim realitically thinking it would work for him.

The Norks have to know by now that we pose no threat of invasion or even attack, short of a clear national security threat to the US or an ally.

So where’s the payoff for attaining nuclear ICBM capability? What can the Norks be envisioning that could allow them to use that capability to deter the US from interferring with their societal committment to reunification of Korea under the North? Which IMO is the only rationale commensurate with such a costly, decades long pursuit of nuclear ICBM capability.

After much reflection I can only think of one tactic that Kim can employ; nuclear blackmail. Nuclear ICBMs will provide Kim with the means to hold hostage 150+MILLION non-partisan innocents in regional urban pop. centers. Nor will anyone doubt his ruthless willingness to carry out such a threat. Nor could we stop such a launch without a massive first strike that would turn much of N.Korea into a glass parking lot and kill as many as 25+ MILLION N. Koreans. That BTW, also risks pulling China into a nuclear confrontation…