Sundance, at Conservative Tree House, contends that Trump has a larger policy goal in the case of China than is generally understood.

China controls North Korea; essentially as a proxy province. As a result Beijing controls the messaging from the DPRK. Chinese Chairman Xi Jinping is the captor and North Korean Chairman Kim Jong-un is the captive – it’s essentially a hostage dynamic. The historic objective has been to use DPRK aggression as a hedge against the west.

Predictably there was going to come a moment when Chairman Xi realized the trade negotiations by his adversary, President Trump, were a hall of mirrors. The U.S. President has played China by using their own panda-mask strategy against them.

President Trump achieved his goal when no-one was paying attention. The goal was a decoupling from China on economic terms. Strategic decoupling has been underway for over a year. There is no actual intent to reach a trade deal with China where the U.S. drops the tariffs and returns to holding hands with a happy panda playing by new rules. This fictional narrative is a figment of fantasy being sold by a financial media that cannot fathom a U.S. President would be so bold as to just walk away from China.

For almost three years U.S. President Trump has been working on two connected objectives: (1) removing the threat posed by North Korea by severing the ability of Beijing to use the proxy province as a weapon (Kim is hostage to China); and (2) deconstructing the growing economic influence of China.

Both issues are directly connected to U.S. national security; and both issues are being approached by President Trump through the use of economic leverage to achieve national security results.

RTWT

If he’s right, and Trump really is undoing the tremendous harm that Richard Nixon did, he is going to go down in History as a great president.

HT: John Meyer.

What could be more appropriate? They are the people Kim will be using it on.

Slate interviews B.R. Myers, a regional expert, about what North Korea is really trying to accomplish with all the saber-rattling and provocations.

The stars are aligning very nicely for the strategy [Kim Jong-Un] inherited from his father. Just as North Korea is perfecting its nuclear weaponry, China has acquired the economic power to punish South Korea for improving its missile defenses. Opinion polls in the South now strongly favor the left-wing presidential candidate Mun Jae-in, who in 2011 expressed hope for the speedy realization of a North–South confederation. If he or anyone else from the nationalist left takes over, years of South Korean accommodation of the North will ensue, complete with massive unconditional aid.

This went on under George W. Bush, and the alliance survived. Donald Trump, however, is much less likely to allow an ostensible ally to subvert UN sanctions while paying tributary visits to Pyongyang. And Kim Jong-un knows this. He knows that whatever security guarantees Trump gave to Seoul were made to the current conservative administration only. So Kim Jong-un has a better chance than his father did of pressuring the alliance to a breaking point. With China’s support he can pull a left-wing South Korean administration in one way while pushing the Americans in another.

Having lived in South Korea for the past 15 years, I don’t share most Americans’ confidence that it will always choose America over a North-supporting China. My own impression—bolstered by the ongoing controversy surrounding the stationing of the THAAD missile defense system—is that a growing number of South Koreans would rather see their state’s security compromised than risk their own prosperity.

Let’s not overestimate South Koreans’ attachment to their own state, which a sizable but influential minority still considers illegitimate. The most popular movie in Seoul at the moment is a thriller about a joint North–South effort to catch a criminal ring of North Korean defectors. That plot tells you something right there. The main North Korean character is played for cool by a handsome Tom Cruise type, while his South Korean counterpart is a homely, tired-looking figure of fun. There is a tradition of this sort of casting. The subtext: Serving the North is glamorous; serving the South, not so much. Let’s keep in mind that Kim Jong-un is watching these movies too.
…

[W]e must stop focusing on short-term shifts and nuances in North Korean propaganda and instead grasp the fundamental consistency its ideology has maintained since 1945. We have to take that ideology seriously, however absurd the personality cult may seem. To a radical Korean nationalist, the division of the nation, the race, is an intolerable state of affairs. So too is the continued presence of the foreign army that effected that division in the first place.

Were Kim Jong-un to share our own leader’s love of slogan caps, his would read: Make Korea Whole Again. Unification is not just central to the North’s ideology, but the only sure and lasting solution to its security problem. That makes the nuclear crisis all that more difficult to solve. But we will never get anywhere if we don’t face up to the true and frightening nature of the North’s goals. For decades our politicians and cartoonists have mocked North Korean leaders as squalling babies who wave missiles around just to get our attention. We’re the ones who need to grow up.

RTWT

NBC:

The video, first aired by a Japan’s Fuji TV, was shot by security cameras inside Kuala Lumpur airport.

It shows a woman coming up behind a man, believed to be Kim, putting her arms over him and apparently pulling something across his face.

Kim, the estranged half-brother of North Korea’s supreme leader Kim Jong Un, is then seen talking with airport security personnel, before attending an airport medical clinic.

He was taken from the airport by ambulance after the incident on Feb. 13, but died on the way to hospital.

Malaysian police believe that he was poisoned, and South Korea has said it believes the killing was carried out by North Korean agents.

The killing has set off a diplomatic spat between Malaysia and North Korea. Pyongyang’s ambassador has said it will refuse to accept the results of a Malaysian police investigation into Kim’s death, accusing authorities of “colluding with outside forces” — a veiled reference to rival South Korea.

Meanwhile, Malaysia has recalled its ambassador from Pyongyang for consultations, and summoned the North Korean ambassador in the country to explain the allegations.

Reuters:

North Korea has backed presumptive U.S. Republican nominee Donald Trump, with a propaganda website praising him as “a prescient presidential candidate” who can liberate Americans living under daily fear of nuclear attack by the North.

A column carried on Tuesday by DPRK Today, one of the reclusive and dynastic state’s mouthpieces, described Trump as a “wise politician” and the right choice for U.S. voters in the Nov. 8 U.S. presidential election.

It described his most likely Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, as “thick-headed Hillary” over her proposal to apply the Iran model of wide sanctions to resolve the nuclear weapons issue on the Korean peninsula.

Read the whole thing.

——————————————–

But, hey! Kim Jong-Un was undoubtedly just reciprocating. After all, back in January, Donald Trump had kind words for North Korea’s insane and murderous dictator. In fact, he praised him specifically for his ruthlessness and brutality.

Telegraph:

Donald Trump has praised the leadership style of North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-un, for the “amazing” way he murders political rivals.

During a Republican political rally in Iowa at the weekend, he repeated his assertion that Muslims should not be allowed to enter the US before turning his attention to the North Korean despot, who has carried out frequent purges of officials.

“You’ve got to give him credit. How many young guys – he was like 26 or 25 when his father died – take over these tough generals, and all of a sudden… he goes in, he takes over, he’s the boss,” said Mr Trump, known for his own less than subtle style of leadership in the American version of The Apprentice.

“It’s incredible. He wiped out the uncle, he wiped out this one, that one. This guy doesn’t play games.

Hilarious North Korean propaganda videos showing fanatical pilots taking off in 40 to 60 year old Russian jets to crush their American adversaries, pretty ladies shopping in friendly stores packed with merchandise, advertising the automobile of which they have successfully produced 1000 examples in 16 years, depicting the long-promised “Three-Day-War” in which North Korea completely routs South Korea and her American ally, and so on.

io9