gisambards wrote:Crimson847 wrote:US presidents have "managed" to improve relations between South and North?
Quoting a single word and then placing it an entirely false context is pretty abysmal debating technique. I never suggested anything close to this.
I apologize; I genuinely took that to be part of your argument.
When you asked what specifically Trump had done that previous presidents hadn't, you told me not to take into account any events we don't yet know the outcome of, but only what had been solidly achieved. But then apparently the riposte to that is that previous presidents probably could have achieved what Trump has if they'd been able to?
The riposte is twofold. The first part is that we don't know if those presidents would have been able to achieve the same, because it wasn't an option at the time.
Let me put it this way: suppose you give two students (let's call them Joe and Susie) a standardized test, but Joe's test also has an extra credit question worth 5 extra points, and Susie's does not. Later on, you're looking at their scores to try to figure out which of the two understands the material better. If your goal is to compare the proficiency of the two students, wouldn't you disregard the points from that extra credit question and only consider the questions that both students had the opportunity to answer? If Joe gets 93 points and Susie gets 88, solely because Joe got the five points from the extra credit question, should that be taken as proof that he understands the material better than Susie does?
Moreover, in Clinton's case (not Bush's--I was mistaken about that) we know he was able to get prisoners released, because when given the opportunity he did. In keeping with the above analogy, if Susie has correctly answered that same question on other tests, wouldn't that make counting it against her in a comparison even less reasonable?
The effort towards peace from the North Korean side is unprecedented. As mentioned, they've been making considerable overtures to the South. A North Korean leader is on his way to New York right now to meet Trump. The summit still appears to be going ahead very soon, with a location and date fully prepared. This is not remotely expected behaviour.
Thus far, you haven't mentioned any overtures that haven't already occurred in similar fashion in the past. You say that "this time there were actual meetings between the two Korean leaders", which is confusing because that happened
last time and
the time before that, too. You say there's an opportunity for a "temporary peace". I don't disagree, but that's also entirely consistent with a conflict that's seen many temporary peaces over the years, usually right before the next boot drops. You say that the North has made "considerable overtures" to the South; Kim Jong-Il
laid on the charm in 2000, too. And while he was doing so, he was secretly making plutonium for nuclear weapons in violation of the Agreed Framework.
During the lead-up to the summit, North Korea expanded its diplomatic engagement with the outside world, just as Kim Jong Un has done in recent months. Kim Jong-il met with Chinese leaders in Beijing before of the summit and would later welcome Russian President Vladimir Putin to Pyongyang.
Famine and extreme shortages of goods and fuel in the 1990s plagued North Korea — in part because of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. This provided motivation for the North to engage with the international community.
Images of Kim Dae-jung and Kim Jong-il shaking hands and clinking champagne glasses filled the airwaves and enthralled many South Korean viewers, as the two leaders signed a broad agreement to work toward peace and reunification. Kim Jong-il called the date of the meeting, June 13, “a day that would be recorded in history.”
Kim Dae-jung later declared that ''the danger of war on the Korean Peninsula has disappeared.''
Kim Dae-jung would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in November that year for his "sunshine policy" of rapprochement with the North. Economic cooperation followed the meeting, along with rail and road links and the start of a family reunion program.
By the end of 2002, the international community found that North Korea secretly continued its missile and nuclear programs, in violation of a 1994 framework signed with the United States. In 2003, a scandal emerged that Kim Dae-jung’s administration had secretly — and illegally — transferred hundreds of millions of dollars to North Korea to attend the summit.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/wor ... 545225002/I think a distaste for Donald Trump is being allowed to disabuse people of the notion that at least a temporary peace is also a distinct possibility.
A temporary peace has already happened and is ongoing. The problem is that North Korea normally just uses these diplomatic detentes to buy some time and maybe get some aid or sanctions relief before we find out they were screwing us the whole time and they walk away giggling. Temporary peace on such terms is not so much a "win" as it is passing the buck: rather than solving or even reducing the problem, it just kicks the can down the road while making it a larger problem next time, as with the peace Clinton "achieved" in 1994 or the peace Kim Dae-jung "achieved" in 2000. We won't know if this time is any different until the negotiations finish and a deal is reached (if any). Until then, chalking this detente up as an unprecedented win for the US before negotiations have even really begun still strikes me as distinctly premature.
"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them; but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn