Jeffrey Lewis states something obvious that many people in the U.S. don’t want to admit:
There are really two assessments in the Post’s report. One, dated July 28, is that the intelligence community — not just the Defense Intelligence Agency, contrary to what you may have heard — “assesses North Korea has produced nuclear weapons for ballistic missile delivery, to include delivery by ICBM-class missiles.” The other assessment, published earlier in July, stated that North Korea had 60 nuclear weapons — higher than the estimates usually given in the press. Put them together, though, and its pretty clear that the window for denuclearizing North Korea, by diplomacy or by force, has closed [bold mine-DL].These judgments are front-page news, but only because we’ve been living in collective denial.
In response to the recent U.N. Security Council vote, North Korea’s government stated that it would not negotiate over its nuclear or missile programs. The assumption that seems to be behind Trump administration policy is that they can be cajoled into doing this, and furthermore that they can be pressured into making concessions on these issues before talks begin. The administration is laboring under the delusion that it is still possible to persuade North Korea to give up on things that its government considers essential to its security. If anything, the heightened tensions and increased pressure in recent months have just confirmed their leadership in the belief that they need their nuclear weapons and missiles more than ever. Needless to say, talking about raining down “fire and fury” on them isn’t going to make them more likely to compromise on this point.
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