Thursday, June 14, 2018

2018 Trump-Kim: Happy to Eat a Nothingburger

The Summit Has Come To Pass.


This happened.


... and I have two minds.

First of all, has the world ever breathed a bigger sigh of relief simply because "Oh good. He didn't fuck it up"? Recency bias being what it is, probably, but I can't think of when.

I've followed a lot of the hot takes on Twitter, only to have trouble finding them back again, but they basically boil down to kind of Robert E Kelly's "This is a bad idea" take here, all in one place on the thread reader app. Click on the tweets to read the whole thread.

also here on Twitter:



or Ask A Korean's "let's go with it" view:


or click on this one for a more detailed 14-part tweet thread.

Going back to my previous post on this, where I talked about what would be a positive sign of substantive change, and what would mostly be window-dressing, most of what happened at the summit was on Tier one: could be window-dressing. We will need to wait and see what is borne out in ground-level negotiations before we can say whether this process was a success.

ON THE OTHER HAND