Here is a tale of three headlines. Think of the first two facts as "apples" about about the visit of North Korea leader Kim Jong Un to China to meet the president of that nation, Xi Jinping. And then consider the third headline as a "banana" reflecting the spin control CNN tried to toss in order to express their antipathy towards President Donald Trump.
The first headline from CNBC stated that China claims Kim Jong Un has agreed to denuclearize Korean Peninsula. The second headline comes to us from Reuters: China says North Korea's Kim pledged commitment to denuclearization. And the third headline on the same subject is this CNN spin: China throws Trump a curveball ahead of his meeting with Kim. No real surprise that the third headline is for an article written by CNN senior producer Jamie Tarabay who in February spun that “North Korea is winning the Olympics --and it's not because of sports.”
Her latest spin control effort is an obvious attempt to toss cold water on the possible denuclearization breakthrough and to downgrade Trump's role in making this possible:
The date for their meeting is still not set, but when President Donald Trump finally meets North
Korea's Kim Jong Un, the specter of China will also be in the room, a potent signal to the American President that the young reclusive leader has support for his cause from the region's most formidable presence.
Along with shoring up a rocky alliance, the two-day visit by Kim to Beijing was also designed to show Washington and Seoul that Kim wasn't without his own diplomatic arsenal as he attempts to push for sanctions relief and recognition of North Korea as a legitimate nuclear power.
..."The very fact of this meeting alone, and certainly the tenor of the Chinese statement about it, really does increase Kim Jong Un's leverage in the upcoming talks. It shows that Kim has a friend in Beijing," said Adam Mount, a senior fellow and director of the Defense Posture Project at the Federation of American Scientists, where he covers US nuclear strategy, deterrence and North Korea.
"It means the Trump team is going to be navigating really narrow straits here. It's hard to overstate how dramatic this development is," Mount said.
Yeah, really bad news for Trump who only managed to get the process of denuclearization as just confirmed by China much further along than any of his predecessors. We can't really let that stand so let's go with some banana spin control to denigrate his efforts.
The China visit has added a layer of complication for Trump that had long been dormant because of years of estrangement between Pyongyang and Beijing.
Now that ties are seemingly mended, that bodes ill for the White House, said Mount.
Yeah, it bodes really ill that both China and North Korea have just confirmed a willingness for denuclearization. The horror! The horror!
The notion that might have held sway until this week, that North Korea was prepared to meet with Trump and put "nukes" on the table, is no longer the case, said Mike Chinoy, a former CNN correspondent and author of "Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis," who has made regular visits to North Korea in the past.
"This didn't look to me like a browbeating summit, that is not the dynamic at all," Chinoy remarked. Rather, it appears that Kim has been shoring up his alliances in anticipation of the meeting with Trump.
Yeah, let's just pretend that China didn't announce this week anything about North Korea's willingness to denuclearize which you can read about in the CNBC and Reuters stories.
"We should not agree to allow China to host the summit or even be present at the summit," said David Maxwell. "That said, the best outcome for this summit is simply a meet and greet between Trump and Kim Jong Un, an exchange of positions and an agreement to allow the diplomatic experts to begin the process of negotiating an agreement," he told CNN. "We should not expect any breakthroughs."
Yeah. Trump should just make a quick meet and greet at the summit and then just shut up. Oh, and he should not get any credit for any breakthroughs that probably won't happen. Or at least what CNN desperately hopes won't happen since it would ruin their incompetent Trump banana narrative.
