We’ve heard this before but not in a long time.
Keeping diplomatic developments coming at a head-snapping pace, the South Korean government said on Sunday that North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, had told President Moon Jae-in that he would abandon his nuclear weapons if the United States agreed to formally end the Korean War and promise not to invade his country.
What’s different?
Mr. Kim visited South Korea. That’s never happened. Mr. Kim visited with the US Sec. of State and is meeting the US President. That’ never happened. Oh, and Mr. Trump never pandered, called Kim’s bluff, escalated the US presence, and dared North Korea to flinch. But does any of that change anything?
It might. China claims that North Korea’s underground test facility collapsed and may be leaking radiation.
Chinese geologists claim in a new study that the mountain above North Korea’s main nuclear test site collapsed in September, rendering the area unsafe for further testing because of possible radiation leaks — a finding that may shed a different light on Kim Jong Un’s announcement that his country was ceasing its nuclear testing program.
And it is a good bet that China, which is a scant 60 miles from the collapsed test site, isn’t happy. And so we get diplomacy.
A South Korean government spokesman, Yoon Young-chan, provided remarkable details of a summit meeting the two Korean heads of state held on Friday, when Mr. Kim made history by becoming the first North Korean leader to set foot in the South.
“I know the Americans are inherently disposed against us, but when they talk with us, they will see that I am not the kind of person who would shoot nuclear weapons to the south, over the Pacific or at the United States,” Mr. Kim told Mr. Moon, according to Mr. Yoon’s account.
Unless you have a short memory, Kim Jong Un has been nothing, but the sort disposed to saying he’d send his weapons hither an yon. That was before his mountain fell, making it easy for him to say they will conduct no more tests.
Which brings us back to the beginning. We’ve heard this before. If we get past words to deeds, well that, will be something.
