Trump Falls for Kim Jong Un's Latest Bait and Switch

Watch for North Korea to turn over the remains of some Americans who died 65 years ago. Trump will say it’s a triumph. But what about the nukes? No talk of turning those over.

DONALD KIRK
06.26.18 5:08 AM ET

SEOUL—The North Koreans are drawing everyone from President Donald Trump to the U.S. military command here into excited expectation Kim Jong Un is about to return the remains of a few U.S. soldiers from among the 5,300 still listed as “missing in action” 65 years after the Korean War. But there’s something lost in the exaltation: talk of “complete denuclearization.”

When Trump told a rally in Duluth, Minnesota, last week that North Korea already had returned the remains of 200 of “our great fallen heroes,” U.S. and South Korean officials were puzzled, to say the least. Nobody here had heard about the return of the remains since Trump had taken credit for getting Kim to agree to a fourth point on the slim statement they signed at the Singapore summit on June 12: “The United States and the DPRK commit to recovering POW/MIA remains, including the immediate repatriation of those already identified.”

Since then, the North Koreans have conducted a dilatory process leading at last to an understanding by the U.S. command that the Kim regime is poised to return maybe 200 remains, maybe more, maybe less.

Clearly something’s up. U.S. Army trucks carrying 100 wooden coffins have moved to the joint security area straddling the line between the two Koreas at the truce village of Panmunjom. The trucks have unloaded trestles on which the coffins are resting, and flags of the United Nations Command, which includes the U.S. and 16 Korean War allies, are flying above them.

That doesn’t mean that anyone knows for sure what’s happening. Even Defense Secretary Jim Mattis seemed uncertain on his way to the region this week. The U.N. Command “is prepared, now to receive those remains,” he said. “We are simply standing by for whatever diplomatic activities are done.” He was “optimistic,” he said, since “that was an agreement coming out of Singapore” — a reference, that is, to transfer of the remains, not the nuclear issue. Mattis arrives Thursday in Korea on a swing that’s also taking him to China and Japan.

more
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-falls-for-kim-jong-uns-latest-bait-and-switch?ref=home