Alex WellersteinVerified account

Under any other administration, the joint declaration would be easily denounced as an empty waste of time. Under the present one, it's progress — it gives the appearance of a "win," and reduces the chances of military action against DPRK. I'll take it, given the circumstances.

When your options are, "get into a Twitter fight with a nuclear power" or "make empty joint declarations of friendships with a dictator," the latter is — sad as it may be — preferable.

The most positive thing you can say about it is that Trump was open to essentially giving the DPRK what they wanted, in exchange for some good publicity. Under the circumstances, that may have been the best of all realistic outcomes, and certainly better than the previous path.

One last "take" for now: only someone totally oblivious to diplomacy, disarmament, and obligations to allies, with the full blessing of his party no matter what he does, could have allowed DPRK to "join" the world in this way, without any real preconditions or obligations.

That's not a really positive statement about Trump. Things built on nothing tend to fall apart on nothing, too. But US-DPRK relations have been in a tailspin since the 1990s, when the GOP deliberately sabotaged them to score political points. So a reset of some sort was needed.

The irony here is obvious: perhaps near-total capitulation was exactly what was needed in this circumstance? That the GOP would sign off on it (so far), to avoid contradicting Trump, is not in the least surprising, and maybe actually expedient in this instance.