Tip to Trump on North Korea: Follow your gut
Apr 25, 2017, 8:25 AM | Updated: 9:51 am
President Trump says he has officially lost patience with North Korea. I spoke with John DeLury, who teaches Chinese studies at Yonsei University in Seoul, just 30 miles from the big guns.
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I figure when you live that close, you think very seriously about how to deal with Kim Jong-un’s nuclear weapons. And DeLury quoted to me something Donald Trump said during the campaign — back before he lost patience.
“He said, ‘I would talk to this guy; why don’t we talk to this guy?'” DeLury said.
It was at a rally in Atlanta on June 15, 2016. “Why not?” Trump said. “There’s a 10 percent or a 20 percent chance that I can talk him out of those damn nukes, because who the hell wants him to have nukes?”
“Go back to your gut instinct, you’re actually right on this one and you need to get out of the warmongering,” DeLury said. “Because it’s either a bluff that is gonna be called at one point, which is not good, or it’s a bluff that you’re going to carry out, which has catastrophic consequences.”
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The North would probably open up on South Korea, and it wouldn’t just hit military installations.
“Where I’m sitting here, our university — one of the top universities in South Korea — is easily within artillery range,” he said.
So I asked him: As someone sitting in the line of fire, what would you whisper in the president’s ear?
“You, Donald Trump … have a lot of leverage once you’re ready to use deal making and start dealing with the root of the problem, which is North Korea’s profound sense of insecurity,” Delong said.
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