The Trump Administration’s Dishonest North Korea Spin
The Trump administration keeps pretending that North Korea has agreed to disarm when it did no such thing:
“What we are going on is the commitment that Chairman Kim made to our president, and that is the commitment to denuclearize. That is something that we certainly anticipate that he will hold up his end of the bargain,” Nauert said.
North Korea didn’t agree to disarm at Singapore or at any other time, and administration officials who keep claiming that they did are misleading the public by misrepresenting the results of the summit. When we see reports that North Korea continues to work on its nuclear weapons and missile programs, that should come as no surprise because North Korea’s government made no commitments not to do those things. It is important to understand this because the administration may try to accuse North Korea of cheating or backtracking later on, but North Korea didn’t make any promises to disarm. There is no agreement to be violated, and there is no commitment for North Korea to follow through on. No bargain was struck, and so there is nothing for North Korea to do to fulfill its end of a non-existent bargain. Clinging to the lie that Kim made a commitment to disarm is absurd, and it makes it impossible to trust anything that the administration says about this issue.
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