First, I agree ex-presidents should shut the F- up when
it comes to contemporary issues. I don’t want to hear
Bush Sr. talking about trade or Iraq or anything dealing
with anything outside his presidency except what came
before it. A US president is not a senator or former rep
or sec of state. When a pres goes to a place like SK, they
listen as do people like the Norks. They don’t understand
a former president could sell peanuts at a Braves game
for all we care about them. And it makes dealing with
other countries harder.

Next, as for the deal that will come, it will come
because nobody, and I mean dem or rep or official pundit,
wants to risk a cutting North Korea off enough to make them
collapse because we fear an explosion onto SK and possibly Japan.

We also can’t stomach seeing hundreds of thousands to millions of Koreans
starving to death “because we cut off humanitarian aid”…
we could probably stomach it, actually, but we can’t handle
the New Yorker or Atlantic Monthly writing about it.

No…..our hypocrisy is that we feel goody goody doing a Clinton where
we send food shipments and sit back and watch millions of Koreans starve
to death anyway, because we can’t bring ourselves to fight the root cause
but can say, “We tried! We good! We sent food!”

It is intellectually acceptable for us to send food, material, and
money that does not prevent hundreds of thousands starving to death but
does ensure or at least prolong the survival of the regime.

But it is not acceptable to cut North Korea off and let similar numbers
and possible (likely) many more die.

And what I guess is even worse, for some idiotic reason
we can’t follow the example we are really setting and
just send gobs and gobs of money and material and food
North Korea to save it outright.

No. Saving it outright. Treating it like Europe after
WWII and having a Nork Marshal Plan —- the nature of
the regime be damned! —- doesn’t suit us right either.

So instead we stick with the typical non-answer answer
of hiding our eyes as millions die and we aid their deaths
but feeling good about ourselves that we tried to make a
difference in North Korea (intice them to change) and help
their people with humanitarian aid….

Nobody can come out and state what the reality is…

“We are not willing to risk war or bloodshed outside
North Korea if the regime collapses. So we are going to
keep the regime alive, but not strong enough to make a move
against the South or cause too large a problem elsewhere. As
long as they are starving, they need us. Sorry North Korean
people…..”