Trump's Delusions of Grandeur are now White House Policy

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Days after his return from Singapore, Donald Trump was triumphant. “Everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office,” he declared on Twitter, shortly after his fulsome encounter with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.” In the three weeks since their cozy photo op, however, there has been zero evidence that North Korea is taking steps to denuclearize—an objective that U.S. officials previously described as a precondition for detente. On the contrary, North Korea appears to be ramping up its weapons program with vigor. In the last week alone, satellite imagery revealed that Kim’s regime is making new improvements to its Yongbyon nuclear facility. The Wall Street Journal reported that he has expanded a key solid-fuel missile facility. U.S. intelligence officials told The Washington Post they have evidence North Korea is trying to conceal its nuclear weapons from any future inspections, including the existence of a secret second uranium-enrichment site known as Kangson. NBC News reported similar findings Friday, featuring unnamed senior U.S. officials trying to get the word out. “Work is ongoing to deceive us on the number of facilities, the number of weapons, the number of missiles,” one official cautioned. “We are watching closely.”

The president’s many foreign-policy skeptics are not surprised. “Kim Jong Un is not offering to give up his nuclear weapons. The North Koreans have never—not once—offered to disarm,” Jeffrey Lewis, the director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at Middlebury College, told me. “That should be a clue.” Inside the White House, however, a strange sort of delusion appears to have taken over. Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders is dodging questions about North Korean human-rights abuses. National Security Adviser John Bolton is refusing to publicly address Kim’s moves to strengthen his weapons program. Axios reports that some in the administration are so optimistic about negotiations that they’re already discussing the possibility of a second Trump-Kim summit in September, on the sidelines of the annual United Nations General Assembly. It would be Kim’s first-ever visit to the United States—a momentous diplomatic breakthrough for the young dictator as he seeks to establish his legitimacy on the world stage. (“I think it’s great to give him credibility,” Trump said last month.)

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07/donald-trump-kim-jong-un-north-korea-denuclearization