Connect with us

Foreign Policy

Trump Says ‘We’ll See What Happens’ With North Korea Summit After Bolton’s Demands Prompt Cancellation Threats

Published

on

White House National Security Adviser during a recent appearance on CNN's "State of the Union" (screengrab image)

WASHINGTON, May 16, 2018 — President Donald Trump on Wednesday told reporters he hadn’t heard anything from North Korea regarding threats to cancel his planned summit unless the United States walks back demands for leader Kim Jong Un to agree to a disarmament plan along the lines of those agreed to by the former leaders of Iraq and Libya.

“We haven’t been notified at all, we’ll have to see,” Trump said during an Oval Office photo opportunity with Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev. “We haven’t received anything, we haven’t heard anything. We will see what happens.”

Plans for the June 12 summit, which is set to take place in Singapore and would be the first between an American president and a member of the hereditary dictatorship that has led North Korea since the end of the Korean War, hit a snag Wednesday after the North canceled planned joint talks with South Korea over its participation in joint military drills with the United States.

While drills are a longstanding annual event, they’ve long been a sticking point in relations between Seoul and Pyongyang, which sees them as a provocation and maintains — incorrectly — that they are a dress rehearsal for an invasion by the United States and South Korea. This year’s exercises were originally set for earlier this year but were postponed as a goodwill gesture after North Korea agreed to talks with the South, and to send a delegation to the Winter Olympics held in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

Pyongyang says summit still possible, pushes back at Bolton’s demands

In a statement carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency, North Korean vice foreign minister Kim Gye Gwan said the Trump administration “will receive a deserved response from us” if it approaches the summit “with sincerity” out of a desire to improve relations.

“However, if the U.S. is trying to drive us into a corner to force our unilateral nuclear abandonment, we will no longer be interested in such dialogue and cannot but reconsider our proceeding to the DPRK-U.S. summit,” he added, using the abbreviation for North Korea’s official name, the Democratic Republic of North Korea.

Kim (no relation to the North Korean leader) also questioned whether the denuclearization process should come before the North is compensated in any way.

He also attacked White House National Security Adviser John Bolton, who appears to have prompted the North’s reaction with statements made during recent television appearances.

During one such appearance, the famously mustached former diplomat, who during his service in the George W. Bush administration, was described by the Kim regime as “human scum” declared the Trump administration’s goal to be the “complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization of North Korea” along the lines of similar efforts by the former governments of Libya and Iraq.

North Korea’s skittishness about disarmament comes from recent history

The North Korean government’s reluctance to give up its nuclear program may have something to do with the fates of similarly-situated governments that gave up similar programs.

In 2004, when Bolton was then-President George W. Bush’s undersecretary of state for arms control, Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi agreed to give up Libya’s nascent nuclear program in exchange for relief from sanctions.

Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein also made a similar concession in exchange for a promise that the United States would not invade Iraq.

But both dictators met their end at their enemies’ hands after their governments were toppled. Gaddafi was executed in 2011 after he was overthrown during Libya’s civil war, and Hussein was hanged in 2006 in the wake of America’s 2004 invasion of Iraq.

Both countries’ fates apparently weigh heavily on the North Korean regime, as Kim’s statement called Bolton’s demand “essentially a manifestation of awfully sinister move[s] to impose on our dignified state the destiny of Libya or Iraq, which had been collapsed due to the yielding of their countries to big powers” rather than “n expression of intention to address the issue through dialogue.”

The “world knows too well that our country is neither Libya nor Iraq, which have met a miserable fate,” he said before referring to his country’s previous dealings with Bolton. “We shed light on the quality of Bolton already in the past, and we do not hide a feeling of repugnance toward him.

print

Andrew Feinberg covers the White House, Capitol Hill, and anywhere else news happens for BeltwayBreakfast.com and BroadbandBreakfast.com. He has reported on policy and politics in the nation's capital since 2007, and his writing has appeared in publications like The Hill, Politico, Communications Daily, Silicon Angle, and Washington Business Journal. He has also appeared on both daytime and prime radio and television news programs on NPR, Sirius-XM, CNN, MSNBC, ABC (Australia), Al Jazeera, NBC Digital, Voice of America, TV Rain (Russia) and CBS News. Andrew wishes he could say he lives in Washington, DC with his dog, but unfortunately, he lives in a no-dogs building in suburban Maryland.

Advertisement
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Congress

Israel Denies Visas to Omar and Tlaib After Trump Says Allowing Them Would Be ‘Weak’

Published

on

WASHINGTON, August 15, 2019 — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday appeared to acquiesce to pressure from President Donald Trump to bar two Democratic lawmakers from visiting that country.

Reps. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., had planned to visit the Israeli-controlled West Bank, which has been under Israeli control since 1967 and is home to a number of the latter’s relatives.

But those plans appeared to have gone awry after Netanyahu’s interior minister, Aryeh Deri, announced on Thursday that the pair would not be granted visas to enter the Israeli-controlled West Bank.

In a statement posted to his official Twitter account, Netanyahu said the actual decision to deny Omar and Tlaib admission had been made by Deri, and was necessitated by their status as “leading activists in promoting the legislation of boycotts against Israel in the American Congress.”

“No country in the world respects America and the American Congress more than the State of Israel,” he said.

“As a free and vibrant democracy, Israel is open to critics and criticism with one exception: Israeli law prohibits the entry into Israel of those who call for and work to impose boycotts on Israel, as do other democracies that prohibit the entry of people who seek to harm the country.”

While Israel’s law targeting supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement has been in effect since 2017, it has never been enforced against American members of Congress.

But the Israeli government’s decision to do so appears to come at the explicit request of President Trump, who was reported last week to have told advisers that Israel should block their entry. Several of Trump’s top aides have close ties to Israeli leaders, including son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, whose family maintains a close friendship with Netanyahu.

Although it had been unclear in recent days whether the Israeli government would apply its anti-BDS law to visiting American lawmakers, there were early indications that Israel would allow Omar and Tlaib’s visit to go forward.

In a recent statement, Israeli Ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer said that Israel would allow Omar and Tlaib to enter out of respect for Israel’s strong relationship with the United States.

And even after reports emerged that Trump was sending signals that Israel should bar them from entering, it appeared that Israel’s government would heed the advice of several top Democratic lawmakers by allowing the visit to go forward.

But Democrats’ efforts were upended early Thursday after President Trump took to Twitter to encourage Israel to bar the two women.

“It would show great weakness if Israel allowed Rep. Omar and Rep. Tlaib to visit,” Trump tweeted, before adding — without evidence — that the two congresswomen “hate Israel & all Jewish people, [and] there is nothing that can be said or done to change their minds.”

Trump also appeared to suggest that a decision by Israel to bar Omar and Tlaib from entering would help the Republican candidates who will run against them in 2020.

“Minnesota and Michigan will have a hard time putting them back in office. They are a disgrace!” He wrote.

Omar and Tlaib have become frequent targets of Trump’s often-racist attacks since they entered Congress in January of this year.

Last month, Trump tweeted that Omar, Tlaib, and two other congresswomen of color — and American citizens — should “go back” to “their countries” if they disagreed with his policies.

Members of Congress and Jewish groups largely denounced the decision to bar Omar and Tlaib as detrimental to the relationship between the two countries.

In a statement, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer called the decision “outrageous,” “wrong,” and “contrary to the statement and assurances to me by Israel’s ambassador to the United States that ‘out of respect for the U.S. Congress and the great alliance between Israel and America, we would not deny entry to any Member of Congress into Israel.’”

“That representation was not true,” Hoyer said, adding that he had urged Netanyahu to allow the trip to go forward during a Wednesday phone conversation.

Hoyer said he appreciated Israel’s willingness to allow Tlaib to visit her family in the West Bank on humanitarian grounds, but he “strongly oppose[s]” the “unwarranted and self-destructive” decision to block the visit she’d planned.

While White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham told BeltwayBreakfast that Trump’s tweet was not an attempt to advise or encourage any action by Israel, one of Tlaib’s fellow Michiganders — Rep. Justin Amash — appeared to directly link the President’s tweet and Israel’s decision.

“Israel should stand up to President Trump and allow our colleagues to visit,” Amash tweeted. “Nobody has to agree with their opinions, but it will inevitably harm U.S.-Israel relations if members of Congress are banned from the country.”

Also weighing in against the decision was former National Security Council spokesman Ned Price, who called Netanyahu’s acquiescence to President Trump “an affront to elected American lawmakers” and “a slap in the face to the US-Israeli alliance.”

“[Netanyahu] and President Trump together have inflicted great damage on the relationship that won’t be able to be repaired overnight,” Price said.

“There are any number of foreign governments, Israel among them, that have made a risky, short-term investment in President Trump. When the dust settles, I have every expectation they’ll realize that the short-term gains were illusory and the damage to the bilateral relationship will be long-lasting.”

American Jewish organizations also largely condemned the decision as bad for US-Israel relations.

“This reported decision by Prime Minister Netanyahu is dangerous, unacceptable and wrong,” J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami said in a statement.

“The fact that President Trump has already tweeted out his own call for these representatives to be denied entry illustrates that this decision is motivated purely by politics and ideology — not by the interests of the State of Israel. It is an affront to Congress and the American people and does severe damage to the US-Israel relationship — and it must be reversed immediately.”

American Jewish Committee CEO David Harris said that Israel “did not choose wisely” by reversing its initial decision, which his organization had supported because it was made “out of respect for the fact that both are members of the U.S. Congress, and that Israel rightfully prides itself on being an open, democratic society.”

“While we fully respect Israel’s sovereign right to control entry into the country, a right that every nation employs, and while we are under no illusions about the implacably hostile views of Reps. Omar and Tlaib on Israel-related issues, we nonetheless believe that the costs in the U.S. of barring the entry of two members of Congress may prove even higher than the alternative,” Harris said.

The largest pro-Israel organization in the US, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee — better known as AIPAC — also weighed in against the decision on its’ Twitter account.

“We disagree with Reps. Omar and Tlaib’s support for the anti-Israel and anti-peace BDS movement, along with Rep. Tlaib’s calls for a one-state solution. We also believe every member of Congress should be able to visit and experience our democratic ally Israel firsthand,” an AIPAC spokesperson tweeted.

Continue Reading

Foreign Policy

Senate Votes To Block Trump’s Saudi Arms Deal

Published

on

WASHINGTON, June 20, 2019 — The Senate on Thursday voted to block the Trump administration from using emergency powers to sell billions of dollars worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia, with a bipartisan majority of senators rejecting President Trump’s declaration of a new national emergency to avoid obtaining Congressional approval for international arms sales.

Thursday’s vote marks the second time this year that Republican senators have joined the Democratic minority to rebuke the administration’s policy towards Saudi Arabia, and reflects a growing anger at Trump’s use of emergency powers to avoid involving Congress in national security decisions and his refusal to punish Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman for ordering the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

Earlier this year both the House and Senate passed a resolution under the War Powers Act in order to end American involvement in Saudi Arabia’s ongoing war in Yemen, only to see it vetoed by President Trump.

The resolution is expected to easily pass the Democratic-led House, but faces an almost-certain veto by the President.

Continue Reading

Foreign Policy

Haley Resigns As U.N. Ambassador, Shoots Down 2020 Speculation

Published

on

WASHINGTON, October 9, 2018 — Ambassador Nikki Haley will “take a break” from public service by resigning from her position as the United States’ top U.N. envoy at the end of the year, President Trump said Tuesday morning.

Haley will be leaving “at the end of the year,” Trump said while sitting alongside her in the Oval Office, citing the former South Carolina governor’s desire to “take a break.”

“You have been very special to me, done an incredible job,” he said while addressing Haley, adding that she has done an “incredible job” and “gets it.”

The sudden announcement came less than an hour after Axios broke the surprise news of her resignation.

Within minutes of the story’s appearance online, Haley was spotted by reporters as she walked into the Oval Office with several aides. But when she appeared alongside Trump shortly after she took pains to thank Trump for allowing her to serve, and called her time representing the U.S. at the United Nations “the honor of a lifetime.”

Trump’s conduct of foreign policy, Haley continued, has caused the United States to be respected again.

“Countries may not like what we do, but they respect what we do,” she said.

While some pundits speculated that the timing was connected to the #MeToo-related drama over now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, when he and Haley appeared before cameras, Trump claimed that Haley first approached him six months ago about setting a timetable to depart before the end of the Trump administration’s second year.

Haley is one of two members of the foreign policy team to have served for the entirety of Trump’s time in office. She joined the administration at a time when very few members of the Republican foreign policy establishment wanted to serve the new president, which served him just fine, as most of them had signed open letters criticizing him.

As so-called moderates like former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson were forced out after clashing with Trump over his disdain for international multilateral agreements like the Iran nuclear deal, Haley remained a fixture and an oasis of stability in an administration that has seen turnover at levels unheard of at this point in a president’s first term.

Even as other establishment-minded administration officials incurred Trump’s wrath for pushing back on his most extreme impulses and saw their own reputations sullied, Haley managed to thrive in her role at the U.N.

Her New York-based post gave her a place in the spotlight and a chance to burnish her foreign policy credentials. It also gave her enough geographic distance from Washington to avoid the contempt Trump developed for the members of his national security team who he saw more regularly.

But that geographic distance also allowed her to put political distance between her and the president at moments when she would break from him in one way or another, including the aftermath of last year’s white nationalist riot in Charlottesville, Virginia.

That distance was most evident on the occasions when she would contradict her boss by sharply criticizing the Russian government, even as he continually dismissed the idea that Russia interfered in the 2016 election as a “Democrat hoax” and attacked the Justice Department investigation into the interference as a “witch hunt.”

Haley’s frequent departures from the Gospel of Trump on those matters has made her the subject of endless rumors, most of which place her on the 2020 Republican primary ballot opposing her soon-to-be former boss. But Haley attempted to put a wet blanket on any such speculation by telling reporters that she’d be campaigning for Trump, not against him.

“No, I’m not running in 2020,” she said.

Continue Reading

Copyright © 2018-2021 Breakfast Media LLC Send tips, advertiser/sponsor inquiries, and press releases to press(at)beltwaybreakfast.com.