The New York Times, normally gung-ho about every diplomatic initiative the State Department undertakes, wrote an editorial that sounded as if it was crafted by Lindsey Graham-style neoconservatives. “Mr. Kim’s wins [from the summit] were obvious,”
the paper comments.
“He got what his father and grandfather never did — a meeting with an American president, the legitimacy of being treated as an equal as a nuclear power on the world stage, country flags standing side by side.”
Max Boot, as establishment as one can get in the foreign policy universe, churned out the same drivel in his Washington Post
column. “Kim won an invaluable propaganda windfall: Ruling one of the poorest and most despotic countries in the world ... he was recognized as an equal by the leader of the world’s sole superpower — not just an equal, indeed, but a valued friend.”
Boot is an expert on military and diplomatic history, but apparently, he missed the many examples in the last eighty-odd years when an American president sat down with a vicious, despicable human being in order to solve a problem, forge a pragmatic alliance, or prevent a conflict from spiraling into nuclear war.
