Remember this bit from Tweetledumb back in October?
And just a few days ago, we had Tweetledumber engaged in the who-has-the-bigger-nuclear-button ridiculousness.
On Saturday, however, Pr*sident Trump said to reporters at Camp David that he is “absolutely” willing to talk on the phone with North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un. He also said he hopes talks between North and South Korea have positive results. James Oliphant at Reuters reports:
North Korea agreed on Friday to hold official talks with South Korea next week, the first in more than two years, hours after Washington and Seoul delayed a military exercise amid a standoff over Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs.
“Look, right now they’re talking Olympics. It’s a start, it’s big start. If I weren’t involved they wouldn’t be talking at all right now,” he said.
Kim “knows I‘m not messing around. I‘m not messing around. Not even a little bit, not even one percent. He understands that,” said Trump.
“If something can come out of those talks, that would be a great thing for all of humanity, that would be a great thing for the world,” he said.
But the North and South agreed to border talks two years ago before Trump was in the picture. The announcement this week that the North is ready to sit down with the South is nonetheless more encouraging than all the chest-thumping, crotch-grabbing bluster and braggadocio we’ve been subjected to the past year over North Korea’s nukes and ballistic missiles.
Alex Ward at Vox writes:
So there is reason for optimism — but some experts I spoke to are skeptical that these recent steps will amount to much.
“We need to be very cautious about our expectations given North Korea’s long history of effectively using these talks to drive a wedge between South Korea and its partners, and to push for concessions Seoul couldn’t possibly accept,” Mintaro Oba, a former Obama State Department official who worked on North Korean affairs, told me in an interview on January 4, a day before North Korea agreed to talk to South Korea.