three times in three months. what is your hufrj? there are a couple things going on. north koreans what a re leaf from sanctions and joint military drills. the north korean playbook, the kim family playbook is to be belligerent and hostile. china might be putting them up to it. the chinese trade talks aren t going well for beijing. beijing has traditionally dangled cooperation on north korea in return for something. now the chinese want a lot from president trump on trade. so i think that there is a certain amount of bill: is it possible that beijing is encouraging chairman kim to do this? i think so. we don t know. we ve seen them work in coordinated fashion before. it wouldn t be a surprise if they re doing it now. xi has a lot of things going wrong for him including hong kong. sandra: the president was
byron, they did get european banks to agree to this. it is the deception of it as well. once they got to it. here this was not something, as jonah said, they could ve gone through the u.s. senate. no way that they could do that. it s not a surprise at all that the next president could completely undo something like this. again, have the ability to say they didn t tell you the truth about this deal. it s a bad deal. they lied to you about it. now we are finding out what they agreed to. shannon: let s talk about the other big foreign policy issue. they are prepping for that singapore sung summit. our goal in the summit must be the complete and verifiable irreversible denuclearization of the korean peninsula. we hope it results in peace on the peninsula. the singapore summit, all eyes in the world are on it. my principal concern is this. that kim has the kim family
that s where they are now. is the ambassador talking about that now? i think they re certainly going to talk about it now, because they need to set some parameters. they need to define what they ll talking about. and also i m sure this is the heart of the trump/kim meeting where basically trump is going to lay out, again, what the u.s. position is. remember, the north koreans have said they are willing to go for complete d complete denuclearization. all they wanted was a couple of things from the u.s. that s a marker. now, i m sure they don t mean it, but it is a marker trump will hold them to. we know that, gordon, we know that, you know, leader kim obviously wants to stay in power. does he run the risk of, by opening his economy to the outside world, by taking some of these american capitalistic incentives, if you will, it may internally weaken him? what s his incentive for doing this besides just money in his bank account? the kim family playbook
gordon chang is the author of nuclear showdown north korea takes on the world. let s start with the president s claim of credit. the president says if he were not involved that these conversations between the north and the south would not be happening. true? i hate to say this, but, yes, and no. yes, because kim jong-un, the north korean leader, is, i think, hurting. we heard this in his new year s address. he talked about sanctions being existential threat to his state so clearly he needs to talk to the south koreans to get eight but no, what we are seizing their regular cycle. this is a seven decade old playbook. first the north koreans refuse to talk to south korea and then demand sessions and some of those could be quite big and if they don t get what they want, they throw a tantrum. this is sort of the kim family