On the heels of his increasingly questionable “success” with Kim Jong Un in Singapore (he called off “provocative” military exercises, and in exchange North Korea is, um, producing new ICBMs capable of reaching the United States), President Trump has offered to meet Iranian president Rouhani with no preconditions.
Trump’s offer to meet Rouhani comes shortly after his all-caps warning to the Iranian regime.
Aaron Blake observes in The Washington Post:
Trump’s strategy here seems to be to rattle cages on the international level and frighten other countries into negotiating. Then, after closed-door meetings we aren’t privy to about complex topics that few truly understand, he emerges and makes plausible but deceptive claims about the major deals he has just struck. A GOP base that is predisposed to distrust the media and the experts won’t care when reports like this one cast a spotlight on the overzealousness of those claims.
But overzealous they are — and in a lot of cases, highly premature. The North Korea news drives that home.
(Of course it’s good that the remains of some Korean War soldiers were finally returned to the US. But it’s likely the North Korean regime is holding onto thousands more remains as bargaining chips.)
Unlike Kim, who was smart enough to take up Trump’s offer, it appears Rouhani can’t or won’t do so. Given Trump’s apparent willingness to make agreements with foreign enemies without any serious commitments in return, it would be in the best interest of the Iranian regime– currently undergoing severe social and economic turbulence– to grasp at Trump’s naive offer with both hands. After all he isn’t asking them to stop propping up the Assad regime in Syria or cease their threats to destroy Israel.
If Rouhani was ingratiating and flattering enough, he could probably convince Trump to accept a new nuclear deal less stringent than the one Obama agreed to.
Following his friendly encounters with Kim and Vladimir Putin, Trump is being portrayed as a bulwark against imperialism and “liberal capitalism” by the Stalinist groupuscule known as the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist):
Different emphasis; same message: #imperialism outraged by Trump's rapprochement with Putin. Liberal #capitalism seeks domination; economic crisis drives them to threaten war to protect their markets: #Trump is not delivering! pic.twitter.com/vu6ppSGJVh
— Proletarian CPGB-ML (@CPGBML) July 17, 2018
