The North Korean Summit: A Fantasy of War and Peace

One thing I love about E3 is that the sheer volume of gaming news, gaming discussion, and gaming debates drowns out the rest of the world. I could finally ignore all the endless pro-Trump and anti-Trump drumbeats that pollute this planet. Instead I could focus on stupid video games. Children getting thrown into cages? Sorry, I need to think up my Beyond Good and Evil 2 take. Concentration camps at the border? That sure sucks, but so did Square Enix's press conference. My greatest horrors of anti-immigration racism coming true? ...That Tunic game looks cute though! Sadly now it is Tuesday, the distracting circus of hype is over, and the gaming press is currently on a week-long hangover. Time to talk about that other, less fun media circus from last week.

Last Tuesday Donald Trump signed a thing with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. I call it a "thing" because I don't still don't know what it was. The whole affair sure looked like a major peace accord. There was a piece of paper with signatures on it. News people took pictures of two world leaders shaking hands. Somebody even cooked up a fake trailer. In some ways, the Singapore meeting was the ultimate E3 press conference. It was a big self-congratulations full of pomp and glitz, with no real substance at all.

I know this post might seem hypocritical considering what I wrote about North Korea last year. In case you've forgotten: I said we should back down because Trump's threats were stupid and dangerous. So from that perspective, I'm fully behind the president meeting with Kim Jong Un, shaking his hand, and turning down the heat. I'm glad he's defusing the very tensions he stirred up, but I still have to ask: "what does this mean?" I can't say "oh, Trump did something good" before I know what he did. Especially when I suspect the entire thing was a sham from the start. [Insert obvious Final Fantasy VII Remake joke here.]

Last week's conference was the meeting of two master manipulators of the media. Kim Jong Un has carefully crafted an image for the world. He's a mysterious madman in an exotic kingdom who is as unpredictable as he is dangerous. Press and world leaders fawned over Kim like they found Attila the Hun in the 21st century. They seemed shocked that the weird barbarian was actually a human being. Then you have Donald J. Trump, a conman who has been able to dominate the media for three years now. Of course, all dictators are con men on some level, so no wonder these two could so easily find a tune they could both dance to. The media was so caught up in the theatrics that nobody noticed that nothing had really happened until Thursday.

So the media got a good photo op with one of the most evil men on the planet. However, what they were shown was a document with virtually no solid text in it. The North Korean press called this "the meeting of the century", yet the result was empty, vague promises. The "treaty" or whatever it was supposed to be does not have concrete goals or penalties in case things are not met. There aren't even dates. North Korea has made pledges like this before to other presidents. The paper might as well have been blank.

I'm reminded of the stacks and stacks of blank paper that Trump presented last January when he lied about handing his company over to his children. Everything in the Trump Administration is a fraud and not even a very well hidden one. Why shouldn't his big peace deal be any different? And how fitting is it that he signed a fake treaty with North Korea, the world's biggest Potemkin Village?

Pictured: A North Korea supermarket that's as real as anything that happened last week.

The US does have goals in Korea. We achieved none of them last week. If the goal was to have North Korea disarm, they did not do that. If the goal was to normalize relations with North Korea, that did not happen. Did North Korea end the state of war with the South they've been in for seventy years? No. Did North Korea dismantle its nuclear program? No. Did we reunify the Korean peninsula? No. Is the Kim Dynasty out of power? No. Have we solved the hideous humanitarian crisis that North Korea has been my entire life? No.

All I can tell you is that we gave the Kim regime legitimacy and even recognition of equality. This is merely accepted what has been the de facto truth for years now. North Korea is a nuclear power and they won't give up their bombs. We all knew that a year ago without any need for fake Hollywood trailers. The US also cancelled military exercises with South Korea. So I can tell you one for certain about the meeting: Trump made concessions. What did he get in return?

I guess "not war" is the answer. And "not war" is a good thing compared to "war", I'll always say that, especially when atomic weapons are involved. Then again, were we really about to go to war with North Korea until Trump started swinging his tiny "fire and fury" dick around? Last year I pointed out that North Korea is no real threat to the United States and that Kim Jong Un was not Alaric the Visigoth. He is a rational actor with self-preservation on his mind. Neither side really was serious about a conflict as it turns out. We didn't have anything to fight over in the first place.

Trump and Kim could have had this meeting in February of last year with the same results. If Trump was aiming for peace, why rattle the saber? North Korea doesn't need to be reminded of how strong the US is. We have an army stationed on their border. If we Americans weren't so damned insecure about our Imperial status we wouldn't forget that we are a much bigger threat to the world than the world is a threat to us. The whole process of getting to last Tuesday seems backwards and stupid.

There appears to be no logic behind Trump's foreign policy. Trump will need Chinese support to make any North Korean solution stick, but in the same week as the big Kim Jong Un meeting he escalated a trade war. We're playing nice with one rogue state just months after spitting in another's face. Why should we be friendly to North Korea but not Iran? Why cut ties with Cuba? It certainly isn't some democratic mission, America gave up its Imperial Mission of promoting freedom in 2016. Trump and his supporters don't care about that. Remember: we have fucking children in fucking cages who will probably never see their parents again. America has ZERO moral authority.

Nothing makes sense if you think of these actions as part of a long-term strategy to promote American interests. It isn't for the economy, it isn't for our ideals, it isn't for our defense, so what is it all for?

That's simple: it's for Donald Trump. Everything he does is for himself. America didn't come off looking better last week, but one person in particular did.

This all leads me back to another East Asian conflict. Back to when Richard Nixon expanded the bombing in Vietnam. The Vietnam War should have ended in 1969 at the latest. Everybody by then knew the war was unwinnable and insane. The US only stuck around until 1973 because Nixon needed to look strong before cutting and running. (Oh and we still lost in Vietnam, by the way.) Trump did the same thing, just this time millions of people didn't die. Yet the foreign policy of a global superpower was directed for personal optics, not geopolitical strategy.

Trump needed to look like a strong president so he bullied a country. Then with midterms starting coming and he could see the threat of a Blue Wave, he needed to look like a peacemaking president so he turned into Gandhi. There's so much obsession about "looking like a president", because really, Trump is not a real president. He's an con man playing a part.

The accord itself wasn't the only piece of flim-flam. The entire North Korean crisis was manufactured from the start. All the tweets and the all build-up was utter bullshit. It is the same reality TV logic that Trump lives his life by. Lots of build-up, a shocking swerve, and a grand finale. The fans of the Trump Show were snarling for war last year and now on cue are cheering for skillful diplomacy. Never mind the flip-flop.

Luckily for everybody, there was no real war, only a fantasy. And now there is no real peace, only another fantasy.

Donald J. Trump and Kim Jung Un played a year-long game of make-believe, and we all fell for it. Then they got to come away as heroes. We were the chumps. You can't read any of Trump's "conflicts" at face value. Cutting the Iran Deal was a huge gift to Ayatolla Khamenei and his hardliners. This trade spat with Canada saved Justin Trudeau's approval rating. And Kim Jung Un is more secure and respectable than ever before. The fantasy of war and peace benefits everybody, especially Trump.

Well, it benefits everybody except for us losers on the ground who have to live in reality. At least we can have fun watching greedy rich people play games. It's the EA press conference all over again.