After days of repeatedly telling North Korea to look to the model of Libya—which gave up its weapons, then was invaded, bombed and racked by civil war—Trump has a new deal for rocket man Kim Jong-un. In a Thursday press appearance, Trump promised that, if North Korea would surrender its nuclear weapons, Donald Trump would provide them with “protections” in return.
Trump insisted that he was “willing to do a lot” to make a deal with the North Korean leader, and that Kim really should make a deal. “He will get protections that are very strong.”
What these protections might be, Trump did not say. But at least he did not declare they would be extra large.
Considering the way in which Trump just finished breaking a treaty with Iran even though there was no reason to do so, there might seem to be good reasons for Kim to be a bit unsure about these protections. That’s especially true after Trump and John Bolton made clear they saw North Korea giving up its weapons as step one in the Libyan model, which ended with Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi forced from power, then captured, shot and killed by rebel militias backed up by NATO air support. Kim is unlikely to find this a great bedtime story.
The Libyan Model is very much the reason why tinpot dictators like Kim are determined to acquire and keep nuclear weapons. For guys like Kim, whose lives can be measured in their ability to inflict damage on others, Trump’s actions concerning the Iran treaty have only served to confirm that any “protections” offered by the United States are only as good as the next Donald Trump.
A quick reminder of how the Libyan Model ended, courtesy of Wikipedia…
A video appears to picture Gaddafi being poked or stabbed in the anus "with some kind of stick or knife" or possibly a bayonet ... Pulled onto the front of a pick-up truck, he fell off as it drove away. ... Gaddafi's corpse was placed in the freezer of a local market alongside the corpses of Yunis Jabr and [his son] Mutassim; the bodies were publicly displayed for four days, with Libyans from all over the country coming to view them
Who wouldn’t sign up for that.