North Korea Is Following the Saddam Hussein Playbook.
▻http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/06/12/north-korea-is-following-the-saddam-hussein-playbook
▻https://foreignpolicymag.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/gettyimages-958991294.jpg?w=1635&h=1024&crop=0,0,9
The Iraq analogy would seem to apply a fortiori to Kim’s North Korea. Saddam had good reason to comply, above all because he had already eliminated his weapons of mass destruction, but also because Iraq could return to its role as a major regional power once the sanctions were lifted. North Korea, by contrast, not only has a vast nuclear program, but it has no assets of any value save for those weapons, even if Donald Trump is deeply impressed with the latent value of the country’s beachfront property. Kim is even more accustomed than was Saddam to exercising absolute control over his own territory. Will he be more open than Saddam was to surrendering such control?
Donald Trump, of course, thinks that he will be, because he assumes that Kim cares about what all sensible people care about most–money. He’ll trade in his weapons for a battery of five-star Trump hotels with sea views. It may be so. The Iranian regime did, indeed, make such a calculation, but the legitimacy of that regime depends far more on public support, and thus on economic progress, than does the Kim dynasty, which has used mass starvation as a political weapon. What’s more, if the concessions the Iranians made in order to gain access to world markets were insufficient for Trump, one can hardly conceive what it would take for Kim to achieve full compliance.