I apologize for the lack of posting; my birthday was this week and I've been decently busy most days. I'll do my best this summer to get a minimum of one post per week, while aiming for two per week.
Now this story is a little bit old; however, it's still extremely important, so while you may have already heard the news that Trump has canceled the North Korea summit, the ins and outs of what happened are trickier to catch.
In order to outline 5 main points, I pulled information from two BBC articles, and article from The Guardian, and one from The Atlantic. The links to the articles are as follows: (I usually post headlines with links embedded but I'm having some technical difficulties through Wix today, I hope this doesn't cause an inconvenience to you)
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44233641
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44242558
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/24/trump-cancels-north-korea-nuclear-summit
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/05/trumps-kim-jong-un-summit-letter/561140/
The 5 main points I'm going to juxtapose are essentially about why the summit was canceled. There are whole pieces focusing just on the letter Trump wrote, analysis of his foreign policy, and the impacts of this that can be easily found on almost any outlet, but I decided to focus on the "why" in order to simplify rather than complicate. The points are:
Trump has canceled the summit, and blames it on the other party
Trump wrote an interesting letter in order to convey that message
American allies are confused as to why it happened
Pence compared NK to the Libya model
A NK official, then made inflammatory remarks about VP Pence
So let's look at the first point. It's by far the easiest to catch and the one everyone knows at this point. It in fact was the opening statement of two of the used articles.
The Atlantic never blatantly stated that the summit was canceled but rather referenced it whilst talking about the President's preferred method of conveying that message. The first two both talk about the threatening remarks made by the regime that will be discussed further into the post.
The Atlantic's remarks lead us into the second point.
While The Guardian provides a brief and accurate summary of the letter, BBC begins analyzing the tone of the letter right down to the opening; meanwhile, The Atlantic is frankly in deep into some far-left-pretentious verb-age that would make my high school English teachers squeal.
BBC goes on to talk about the language used in the letter saying:
There's a bit of a passive-aggressive dig at Mr Kim - pointing out that he was the one who wanted the meeting, even if that's "totally irrelevant" - and an emphasis that this was a "long-planned meeting"
The Atlantic is yet again the odd man out in point 3 in which it fails to report about any sort of reaction from the global community.
Regardless, BBC and The Guardian quotes remarks from the president of South Korea, Moon Jae-in, in which they state that they were both surprised and confused by the cancellation. The Guardian goes even further to quote not only comments from South Korean leadership, but the UN's as well, saying:
"Speaking in Geneva, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, said he was “deeply concerned” about the cancellation of the summit,"
Next we look at what essentially rekindled the tensions between the two parties in point 4.
The facts are pretty straight on this one, although The Guardian's statement looks a little off simply due to the lack of context used in the table I made.
Point 5 being about the same, just going on to state the regime's response to Pence's remarks.
All three outline the harsh words of Ms. Choe, the North Korean vice-foreign minister, in which she blatantly rejected the words of Pence regarding Libya.
BBC goes on further to say what The Guardian also mentioned, which was that the comments pushed the deal off of the brink.
"A White House official quoted by Reuters described the comments about Mr Pence as the "last straw".
So at the end of the day, Trump blames the regime for what were in fact extremely inflammatory comments, although in my opinion, this must be taken with a grain of salt. As the articles stated, the summit had been in doubt for a while by both parties, and it could've just as easily been North Korea cancelling on us.
As always, I recommend you go deeper into the story. If you're looking to do this, the second BBC link gives several different options and avenues of analysis to do this from and I strongly encourage giving it a click.
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