It may be that Kim is playing us, but it also seems that complete denuclearization is ridiculous. That is his trump card. That is what prevents him from being forced into an abject and humiliating surrender and opening him to a massacre like those of the Indians in the American West.
Everyone involved should know this.
Our approach needs to be gradualistic, and we need to take regime change off the table. Even if we could somehow use some ultra high tech light bomb to surgically remove every fighting man and woman and their weapons tomorrow with no cost to us, it will still take a generation for those remaining to regain some sense of intellectual freedom and possibility. They have been brutalized far too long for anything quick to even be conceivable, much less desirable.
I want Kentucky Fried Chicken in Pyongyang. McDonald’s. Grocery stores filled with food. Programming and other jobs for North Koreans. Maybe their names will fill the credits of the next Marvel movie.
Kim may want to prevent a mass exodus. Fine. This might even be ideal. The North Korean people need to work their way around gradually to new ways of thinking. What we DO need is regular visits from people from the other side of the DMZ. Let this all take time.
Kim knows, I suspect, that a nuclear war would kill him, and millions of his people. He can’t hope to win. But he CAN keep the threat of nuclear attack on the table to prevent a wholesale invasion of his country. And we should let him.
I say again: there are many people in this world who benefit from the continual threat of war, and even more from actual war. They don’t suffer from it: they BENEFIT. These people need to be marginalized and kept at the periphery, and excluded wherever possible.
My personal view is that John Bolton sabotaged the peace on purpose. Kim Jung Un is irrational in some ways, but utterly rational in others. The threat of another Libya could really only be understood in one way, and only reacted to, at least initially, in one way, the one he chose.