| | | | How Was Trump's North Korea Speech? Bruising. | | President Trump delivered a "bruising insult" of Kim Jong Un's regime during an address at South Korea's National Assembly on Wednesday that stopped short of his earlier "fire and fury" rhetoric, but still warned of the "grave danger" the regime faces in pursuing nuclear weapons, CNN reports.
"North Korea is not the paradise your grandfather envisioned," Trump said. "It is a hell that no person deserves." - More cutting than "Rocket Man." Anna Fifield writes for the Washington Post that Trump's latest speech will have cut far deeper than his "Rocket Man" insults because it strikes "at the very heart of the Kim regime."
"It is hard to exaggerate the reverence with which North Koreans are forced to treat the Kim family," Fifield says. "Every home and all public buildings must display portraits of Kim Il Sung and his son Kim Jong Il that must be cleaned only with a special cloth. North Koreans must bow at monuments to the leaders and sing songs celebrating their supposedly legendary feats.
"There is no escaping the Kims and the narrative that they have created a utopia that is the envy of the world.
"So to suggest that the regime is founded on a 'fantasy' and that the country is something other than a socialist paradise amounts to heresy in North Korea." - Trump earned his standing ovation. Victor Cha, Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and former director for Asian affairs in the National Security Council under President George W. Bush, emails Global Briefing that the speech was broadly a success.
"Despite all of the hand-wringing ahead of President Trump's speech in Korea last night, he managed to pull off a standing ovation. While part of that may have been pageantry, the speech was notable for a number of messages," Cha says.
"It was terribly gracious to the hosts, with a historically-rich description of Korea's model development, which caused even avowedly anti-U.S., progressive lawmakers in the room to applaud. On the alliance, Trump framed the relationship as based not just on common threats, but on common values, messaging a deeper appreciation of the alliance than we have seen from him in the past.
"Most important, while he used tough talk to argue that North Korea should not test the United States (but without the name-calling), he also messaged clearly to the country's leadership that there was a door open to diplomacy should Pyongyang want to take it.
"Finally, President Trump singled out China and Russia to do more on sanctions as he framed North Korea as a global problem, not one specific to the United States and South Korea. Meanwhile, the press statement that followed the speech put flesh on the bones of the speech, laying out a number of deliverables on defense sales, FDI, a revised missile agreement, and cooperation on broader issues like global health."
| | Fareed: Trump's Hosts Getting Personal | | Donald Trump's ongoing visit to China has highlighted a theme that has run throughout the President's visit to Asia so far, Fareed says. For Trump's hosts, it's much more personal than usual.
"What has been interesting to see in China, as with South Korea and especially in Japan, is how the focus among President Trump's hosts has appeared almost entirely based around the personality of the President," Fareed says.
"They are all trying to figure out how to get to Trump, how to woo the President. That's because the feeling seems to be that Trump is very impressionable, that he doesn't have a strong policy direction one way or the other. They are all trying to impress him personally, and so his visit with Xi Jinping to the Forbidden City was very much about that. Trump likes pomp and circumstance, he likes to be flattered, and so a visit to the Forbidden City was the perfect way of doing that.
"Remember, before Trump arrived, Chinese officials described this as a 'state visit-plus,' suggesting they would be going beyond what they had done for other presidents. Why? Because they know that's what Trump wants to hear." - Let's not make a deal. The Trump administration might be keen to tout the commercial deals inked in China this week, writes Doug Palmer for Politico EU. But President Trump's trip "is highlighting a broader failure on the world stage: None of the countries he's visiting wants to negotiate a two-way trade deal with the United States."
"[B]y pulling out of the 12-nation TPP on his third day in office, Trump walked away from free trade deals with Japan, the world's third largest economy, and from Vietnam, one of the fastest growing countries in the Asia-Pacific. And even though Trump said he wanted to hold bilateral free-trade talks with the TPP nations, he hasn't been able to persuade a single country to start.
| | Why the Middle East Looks Like It's About to Explode | | | A whirlwind of weekend events -- the surprise resignation of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri, the Saudi interception of a missile launched from Yemen and a Saudi anti-corruption purge – point to trouble for Lebanon, writes Robert Malley in The Atlantic. And a potential explosion in the Middle East.
"Lebanon and the region arguably have seen all this before; a leadership vacuum in the context of rising tensions is nothing new. What is new, however, is an unusually apprehensive Israel, an unusually assertive and rash Saudi leadership and, of course, an unusual U.S. president," Malley writes. As for Israel: For months now, it has been sounding alarm bells about Hezbollah's and Iran's growing footprint in Syria, and more particularly about the Lebanese movement's soon-to-be-acquired capacity to indigenously produce precision-guided missiles -- a development Israeli officials view as a potential game changer they must thwart."
"Missing from this picture is any hint of diplomacy -- between Iran and Saudi Arabia, Iran and the U.S., or Saudi Arabia and the Houthi; rather, the region faces a free for all in which the only operative restraint on one's actions is nervousness over what it might provoke. That's hardly reassuring." | | The Astonishing Cost of America's Wars: Study | | The U.S. conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Syria, including additional spending on Homeland Security, and the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, will have cost the country more than $4.3 trillion through the current fiscal year, according to a new study from the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
The figure, which rises to more than $5.6 trillion including "likely costs for FY2018 and estimated future spending on veterans," is considerably higher than a Pentagon report on the estimated cost for each taxpayer, which found the bill to be around $1.52 trillion.
Explaining the very different numbers, the Watson Institute report adds: "The difference between this Costs of War Project estimate and other estimates is that it includes not only Pentagon/Department of Defense military spending, but other war-related costs, including war-related spending by the State Department, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security."
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