Donald Trump: from Rocket Man to Courageous Leader

In a broad spectrum speech to a room full of world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly, President Donald Trump touted his summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un as such a meaningful breakthrough that Pyongyang was no longer a threat to the US. Yet in a speech pitched at fourth-grade level and delivered in plain unvarying Trump-style, he defined Iran, which does not have nuclear weapons, as ‘a regime that was sowing chaos, death, and destruction. The president also conveniently fired a salvo at globalism, emphasized on his 'America First' mantra, and reserved much of his fire and fury for leaders of Iran and Venezuela over violations of basic human rights and more. During the 35-minutes long sermon laced with rhetoric, some of the president’s warmest words were not directed at long and loyal US allies but at the North Korean dictator and their new efforts toward diplomacy. Trump lavished praise on Kim Jong Un and expressed enthusiasm for a second summit, a vastly different tone from his debut address at the UNGA last year when the president pilloried Kim as ‘Little Rocket Man’ and threatened to obliterate North Korea if provoked. In the same address, President Trump highlighted the innumerable human rights violations in the hermit kingdom that took place under what he deemed a depraved regime of Kim Jong Un, and urged other nations to isolate the North Korean dictator.

This year, the US president appeared before the UNGA as a Kim Jong Un cheerleader or perhaps as his biggest fanboy. While Trump’s bellicosity last year made the world nervous, his benevolence toward Kim this year is equally alarming even while North Korea has made no major concessions since the icebreaker Singapore summit which was powerful on symbolism but weak on substance where Kim agreed to dismantle a missile test site and a nuclear complex. As always, the progress is negligible. And to all appearances, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s nuclear watchdog, has found no indication that Kim’s regime has halted its nuclear activities or prepared an inventory of its unregulated stockpile of weapons, the first steps toward the vaguely defined dream of denuclearization of the heavily armed Korean Peninsula. So while the leader of the free world might have forgotten how he hammered North Korea and may have also granted a blanket immunity to Kim Jong Un for his endless betrayals of pre-set international norms, the world hasn't. And just to remind President Trump, the reclusive nation -- seen as one of the last Stalinist bulwarks, continues breach basic human rights.

To this day, Pyongyang has thriving concentrations camps where citizens are penalized under the three generation punishment rule -- one of the country's most brutal laws under which convicts of a serious crime are sent to a prison camp along with their immediate family. Then by default, the next two generations born in the camps are also forcefully kept there. Crimes for which North Koreans can find themselves in prison cells, known for their notoriously harsh conditions, can include failure to wipe dust off portraits of Kim Il-sung -- the patriarch of the hereditary dictatorship and having contact with the pariah South Koreans neighbours. This is not it. The puppet Kim dynasty installed by the Soviet Union since the mid 40s has killed millions of North Korean citizens without ever being held accountable for its human rights abuses. According to the UN Commission of Inquiry report on human rights in North Korea, the Kim clan has committed crimes against humanity including extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape and forced abortion. Kim Jong Un alone has reportedly executed or purged a large number of high-level government officials since taking power in 2011. The brutal leader is also known for exercising almost total political control and crushing all forms of dissent in the country. While leaders of this dark regime have lived in the lap of luxury and enjoyed life to the fullest, average North Korean citizens continue to wallow in misery. Not only this but scientists estimate Pyongyang has dozens of nuclear warheads and long-range ballistic missiles that could reach US soil.

The list does not exhaust here but President Donald Trump has decided to exonerate the Kim regime of all acts of sin. Now Iran is not a good actor. It has funded terrorism from time to time and spearheaded proxy wars but by contrast, Tehran, has not developed nuclear weapons and accepts routine international inspections. Its weapons have a limited range and it has no known plans to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles. So this macho approach by the Trump government toward Iran goes on to expose the hypocrisy of the administration’s foreign policy viz a vis the regime which by far has been abiding by many if not all of the international norms set to regulate and limits its nuclear activities.