By DEXTER DUGGAN
What are the portents for morality and freedom in a world where Western leftist elites impose their own shocking notions of what’s decent and acceptable?
Dissenting from their mandates, President Donald Trump can change people’s way of looking at things.
When President Barack Obama visited the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in March 2012, he looked toward the North’s reclusive Hermit Kingdom dictatorship from behind protective glass, with binoculars.
It was a world-outcast sort of place that only a weird celebrity like former U.S. basketball star Dennis Rodman, with his earrings and nose rings and nimble hoopster ways, thought was a defensible destination, repeatedly meeting with mysterious Communist dictator Kim Jong Un.
Rodman’s dream of peacemaking and conciliation pretty much was written off by prevailing opinion as a useless journey. Whatever the respectables’ other differences, they could agree on this.
Once he was in the White House, which course would television showman Trump choose, the glib globalist Obama’s or the court-loping entertainer Rodman’s?
Of course.
Kim had become even more of a villain with his threats and acts of firing dangerous missiles, putting the world on edge and inciting Trump’s fiery warnings. Surely adding the blustery, inconstant Trump to this volatile scene was dragging the globe toward war.
Au contraire!
Before anyone could say “Big surprise,” Trump accepted an invitation from Kim for a meeting, and, after some political pirouetting, off the two with retinues went, to a Singapore summit in June 2018 to explore denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.
The world allegedly about to burst into blazes was being pacified, apparently, by Trump and Kim.
This was followed by a February 2019 summit in Hanoi, Communist Vietnam, cut short over disagreement by the two sides. But not to worry.
Attending the G20 economic summit in late June in Japan, Trump extended a Twitter invitation to Kim to show up at the Demilitarized Zone in two days for a handshake.
Although some diplomatic feelers already had been put forth, the impromptu-seeming invitation produced major results, with Trump becoming the first sitting U.S. president to walk over onto North Korean territory with Kim before they strolled into South Korea for a meeting.
Commentator S. Nathan Park, noting objections about the apparently inadequate nature of the DMZ encounter, posted at CNN on July 1: “These complaints are getting old in their stubborn refusal to reckon with the reality. At this point — two and a half years into this administration — it should be obvious that Trump simply will not conduct diplomacy in a way that foreign-policy experts want him to.”
Although Trump doesn’t have a successful result yet, Park said, neither had any other U.S. president who dealt with North Korea. “It is worth being patient and seeing this through.”
Kim’s iron fist controls a much smaller country than the old Soviet Union or China, but he remains about as unsavory a dictator as any that the U.S. as a world power has felt compelled to confer with in political maneuverings in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
In fact, the U.S. leftist elite spent decades yearning for uncomfortable U.S. summits with merciless Communist totalitarians, mainly as their way of doing the devious Reds reverence. It was after the USSR broke up in the early 1990s that Moscow started to be viewed with deep misgivings by U.S. leftists who previously paid it homage.
Meanwhile Trump, as an experienced big businessman, seems to see an opening by appealing to Kim’s materialism — though Kim rules an impoverished Hermit Kingdom — in the same way that economic improvement was dangled before Mao Zedong’s destitute China beginning in the 1970s.
In Singapore, Trump even showed Kim what was called a “movie trailer” of what could be the material blessings for a new North Korea, including condos, hotels, and resorts. “Think of it from the real-estate perspective,” Trump had said.
Kim’s grandfather, Kim Il-Sung, was the founder of the Communist revolutionary state in 1948, succeeded by son Kim Jong-Il in 1994, who died in 2011 and was followed by current dictator Kim Jong Un.
It’s sometimes said that entrepreneurs’ wealth lasts for three generations: the first generation that makes it and saves it, the second generation that can spend it, and the third generation that has no idea of how to keep and appreciate what was received. Has revolutionary fervor had enough generations to go cold for grandson Kim that he might be induced into, ahem, the property-management line?
If so, Kim will have some bad habits to break. Hardly content with imprisoning and torturing his own people, Kim was the presiding head of government when American college student Otto Warmbier was grabbed from a guided tour group as 2016 began.
Arrested on spurious charges at Pyongyang International Airport, Warmbier wasn’t repatriated to the U.S. until June 2017, where he soon died after having remained comatose. He reportedly had suffered an unknown injury while in the custody of a merciless regime.
Establishment conservative Republican strategist Karl Rove told Fox News Radio’s Brian Kilmeade Show on July 1 that Kim had gone from being a sort of comic figure to a man given international stature. “We’ve elevated him from Little Rocket Man to a close friend of the president,” but with scant result, Rove said.
However, Fred Fleitz, an expert on U.S. government security, posted at Fox News on July 1: “The odds may still be long to reach an agreement that fully denuclearizes North Korea. But President Trump’s unorthodox diplomacy has significantly lowered tensions from the dangerous level he inherited from President Obama and opened a door to peace that no one thought possible.
“Just as important, President Trump’s diplomacy with North Korea has significantly eased tensions on the Korean peninsula and reduced the chances of an accidental war,” Fleitz added. “This is readily apparent by the vastly different DMZ visits by Presidents Barack Obama and Trump.”
Trump also showed personal bravery by going to the DMZ, Fleitz added, suggesting the possibility that in this setting, Kim could have had Trump killed.
However, it seems highly unlikely that Kim, basking in international media attention, would have chosen to rain down opprobrium on himself with such an order.
National conservative columnist Quin Hillyer told The Wanderer on July 1 that Trump’s buddying behavior toward Kim “is inexcusable.”
“What Trump is doing and saying about North Korea’s tin-pot dictator is inexcusable. This is not like Richard Nixon dealing with China, which was part of a grand strategic plan to isolate the even more dangerous Soviet Union,” Hillyer said.
“This is an American president repeatedly praising a murderous thug, perhaps en route to letting the thug keep his nukes. No matter how it plays politically, on substance it is outrageously wrong,” he said.
Keep The Door Open
Conservative Republican political consultant Constantin Querard told The Wanderer on June 30 that no matter what Trump achieves, his Democrat Party foes wouldn’t be satisfied.
“The same Democrats who attacked Trump’s policies toward North Korea as warmongering now accuse him of coddling a dictator. The fact is if North Korea suddenly abandoned its nuclear programs, Democrats would still find a way to say terrible things about Donald Trump because that’s all they know how to do,” Querard said.
“It is personal to them and Trump is their enemy, far more than Putin, Kim Jong Un, or any other actual dictator,” he said.
“Trump is playing a smart game with North Korea and its paranoid leadership. He’s not going to cave and take a bad deal, as illustrated when he walked away from the last round of negotiation,” Querard said. “But he is going to keep the door open and make it possible for North Korea to actually come to a deal that will bring peace to that part of the world, and remove a dangerous player from the world’s nuclear stage.”
One thing for sure: The Hermit Kingdom no longer is off by itself in the corner.
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