how can you not view these peace talks as positive?
what makes you think future conflict is less likely now than it was in 2016?
How can we view the strategies of previous presidents as anything other than wholly ineffective?
i think we both agree that nk disarming itself is not a realistic goal. as such, it makes no sense for either of us to judge past policy by that standard. by more realistic standards, it is virtually impossible to judge past strategy as either effective or ineffective - because we'd have to posit some counterfactual as a basis of comparison. on the positive side it took nk an extraordinarily long time to develop a functional nuclear device, they haven't attacked sk and have been largely isolated from the external world and we still maintain a strategic presence on the korean peninsula. on the negative side, their regime hasn't collapsed or liberalized or reunited with sk, they still pose a military threat to sk and more recently show evidence of having functional nuclear devices to threaten farther afield. and of course their citizenry has been opressed for well over half a century. it's very easy to imagine scenarios both much worse and much better than how things have actually turned out, but i don't think either of us are in any position to evaluate the likelihood of alternate scenarios if us policy had been other than it was.
He also completely neglects to mention South Korea in all of this.
the us and sk do not have completely convergent interests.
and just to reiterate - all of this is interesting to discuss, but it is irrelevant to the point that trump's aim was principally, if not wholly, to impact domestic opinion. that is the fundamental dishonesty. that's why i said in my original post, that you took issue with, that while it might end up generating positive results, i would not credit those results because the process was dishonest.
and i don't think it's likely that the impact will be positive, btw. trump took the accumulated leverage generated by past policy and he spent it on a photo op.