A Warning

by Anonymous

“Maximum pressure” gave way to warm appeasement.

Almost immediately, the president was carried away with the theatrics over the substance.

The great dealmaker wanted to make a deal at almost any price, and Kim Jong Un, that smart cookie, knew it.

The strategy and details didn’t really matter to President Trump, though. He was so confident in his ability to forge a personal connection with Kim that it wasn’t really about the details.

It was about the chemistry.

Unsurprisingly, the Singapore Summit flopped. It didn’t produce any meaningful results, and aides felt validated in their view that chemistr...

Trump was und...

He measured success differently. “I like him, he likes me,” he said at a rally a few months after meeting Kim. “I guess that’s okay. Am I allowed to say that?” He affectionately described the communications between the two lea...

me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters. We fell in love.” In my time in public service, I never thought I would witness a grown man in the Oval Office fawn over a...

Naive doesn’t begin to de...

Had anyone but Trump said something like that, they’d have been laughed out of the White House. It certainly seems they are laughing in North Korea.

With little progress being made on disarmament talks, our administration put more pressure on Pyongyang. This set the president off. In late 2018, the Treasury Department publicly sanctioned

three regime officials for human rights abuses. Trump was furious. “Who did this?” he raged at a...

I lamented to another official that the president was losing sight of reality. North Korea’s government was brutal, untrustworthy, and unlike...

She agreed, and soon after, Trump’s intelligence chiefs echoed the warning in public testimony. North Korea was performing the same song and dance it always did to get the West off its back, offering a faux olive branch to reliev...

Why is the president so attracted to autocrats?

“The president sees in these guys what he wishes he had: total power, no term limits, enforced popularity, and the ability to silence critics for good.” He was spot on. It was the simplest explanation.

He celebrated Chinese president Xi Jinping’s move to permanently install himself in office for life, calling it an “extraordinary elevation,” and telling him privately that he was a “king” for having made the bold move.

He enthused to reporters about Kim Jong Un’s ability to control his population: “He’s the head of a country, and I mean he’s the strong head.

Don’t let anyone think anything different. He speaks, and his people sit up at attention. I wan...

And he commiserated with Putin about the free press in the United States, telling the notorious thug, “You don’t have t...

Trump’s affinity for autocrats means we are flying blind thr...

The moral compass in the cockpit, the one that has charted America’s course ...

The president lacks a cogent agenda for dealing with these rivals because he doesn’t recogniz...

What he doesn’t see, especially with

China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, is that their governments are programmed to oppose us.

They represent the opposite of our values. No “deal” ...

Until their political systems shift fundamentally or they lose power, they will stand against the free and open i...

Like us, they will try to shape the world in their own image. Unlike us, their leaders don’t care about natural rights and are gea...