Trump meets Kim: WTF?

One of the oddest summit meetings in years is taking place tomorrow, if you hadn’t heard. But I ask myself, what do the parties hope to gain?

Jaw, jaw is better than war, war said Churchill, and it’s hard to argue with that. But here’s something else that can prevent war: nuclear weapons. John Pilger once said that the best way for a small country to avoid being dominated by America was to obtain nukes, and it seems to have worked with NK. Of course the US has been trying to strangle it with sanctions, though China has been using the back door to keep its neighbour alive.

So. America would like NK to lose its nukes, while the latter would like the US to lift its sanctions. Of course NK isn’t going to relinquish its nukes, for the reasons given above. And sanctions are the only weapons the US has. Seems like there’s not a lot of wiggle-room. So what’s really going on?

It’s the base, stupid. With a slew of tricky domestic issues to manage, Trump badly wants a distraction from the corrupt regime he has created. He was addressing his base when he basically told the rest of the western world to go fuck itself at the recent G7 summit. And it is his base he is addressing when he goes to Singapore and announces a breakthrough in negotiations, whatever actually happens behind closed doors. And that base will eat it up as they seem to eat up everything he says.

I fear a real breakthrough. Right now the GOP is facing real trouble in America’s mid-term elections in November. They could even lose their majority in both houses. But if Trump can claim a diplomatic victory in Singapore, it could swing support back to him and his party. And that would be bad, very bad, for America and indeed the rest of the world.