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All agreed, however, that the Americans had been slow to recognize that South Koreans no longer saw themselves as junior partners in the defense of their own country and its citizens.
“We were so worried that the Americans might try to stop us,” Im explained, “that it never occurred to us they might make things worse. I don’t even use Twitter.”
The central problem, as has become clear in the course of this commission’s investigations, arose from the peculiarities relating to both process and place. It is impossible to grasp the reasons for the breakdown of the Trump administration’s executive functions without understanding both the process that was in place to provide the president with information and the unusual features of its implementation that arose from the fact that, as the crisis unfolded, the president was not in Washington, but in Palm Beach.
Although the property was built as a private residence in 1929, its owner, Marjorie Merriweather Post, had arranged for Mar-a-Lago to be transferred to the federal government for use as a “Winter White House” after her death.
The president’s insistence on spending time at Mar-a-Lago made Francis’s job much harder, increasing the amount of unstructured time available to the president while physically isolating him from staff who might otherwise keep him engaged and focused.
“She’s no idiot,” this foreign service officer said of Haley. “Trump thought Sullivan was a swamp guy. He hated those guys so much that the fact that she went around [Sullivan] and humiliated him would be a plus.”
everything he knew about surviving told him that he had to act decisively when the moment came. He could wait—but he could not wait too long. He still had intermittent cell-phone service. How long would that last? Once his cell phone stopped working, it would be too late. In the end, Kim’s cell phone provided the final confirmation he needed. An aide showed him a tweet sent by the American president, time-stamped early in the evening at 7:03 PM Seoul time—nearly an hour before the missiles had been launched. The message was in the president’s own distinctive voice. It read: Donald J. Trump
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After an Israeli battery shot down a $200 quadcopter with a $3 million Patriot missile, there was a lot of talk about defense against drones—but
He had endured harangues like this before, but he preferred reading them to listening to them. Yet he knew he had no choice but to sit and take it. If he got up and left, it would be the United States that had walked out of the talks—even if there was, at the moment, only one person talking.
démarche
“background of expectation”—the assumptions and beliefs that allow us to make sense of confusing and contradictory information.
acquiescing,
After all, for Kim Jong Un defeat would mean the loss of everything—his rule, his family, his life. Donald Trump, on the other hand, could simply stop and walk away, suffering nothing more than the same short-lived sting of embarrassment that had befallen many other defeated imperial powers.
“The president just said, ‘Absolutely beautiful,’” recalled a staffer. “I started to cry.”
