“Hooray for President Trump.”
Yes, I did write those words at The Week today, but please, please, stick with me on this.
See the point of the column is to suggest that Trump sucks, but that not-war is better than war. And if Trump somehow stumbled into not-war at the Singapore summit, I’ll take it. Preferable to the deaths of innocents.
The details of the agreement matter less than the the fact that war fever seems to have cooled. Trump can claim victory and go back to being a disastrous president in virtually every other respect. For the moment, he seems to have averted a war that was looking increasingly likely. And sure, it was probably a mix of ill-considered bravado, ego, and ignorance that led him to this result. The process was never going to be pretty.
What’s more: History suggests that a few months or years from now, this president or his successor will realize that North Korea has done little or nothing to denuclearize, and it’s possible we’ll re-enter the cycle of threats and cajoling that has long defined the U.S.-North Korea relationship.
But for now we’re not going to war. That’s good. Hooray.
Some people are reading the column as praise for Trump, but that’s only true in a very, very backhanded fashion.
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