White House ex-advisor John Bolton said the meeting of US and North Korean leaders is a strategic mistake. His remarks came in an interview with ABC.
Bolton says Trump's meeting with Kim Jong-un is a strategic mistake
STEPANAKERT, JUNE 22, ARTSAKHPRESS: Speaking about the first meeting of Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un in Singapore in 2018, Bolton noted that Trump was interested in how many reporters would attend his press conference.
"When we were in Singapore for the first summit, one of the things he said over and over again-- was to ask how many press people were gonna be present for his final press conference. And I think the final number, it was a very large number-- as it should have been, 400, 500.
By the time we left Singapore, he was at 2,000. And I think that number went up from there. That's what he was focused on. That he had had this enormous photo opportunity -- first time an American president has met with the leader of North Korea.
And he got enormous attention from it. I thought it was a strategic mistake. The U.S. itself got nothing from that. Donald Trump got a lot. The United States gave much more legitimacy to this dictator. And didn't accomplish anything toward any meaningful discussion on the elimination of their nuclear weapons program.
To be clear, I don't think North Korea is ever gonna voluntarily give up its nuclear weapons program. They have tried this line for onto 30 years now. And one successive American administration after another has fallen for it. I quote in the book a speech Winston Churchill gave in the House of Commons in the 1930s.
It's a very dark quotation, where he says, "People simply will not take the steps that are necessary when the threat is small, and the risk is low. And they wait and they wait until the threat is large and the risk is high." And Churchill talked about the confirmed unteachability of mankind. That's what we saw in the Trump administration Korea policy," Bolton noted.
Bolton was fired from his post last September. His book 'The Room Where it Happened' is set to be published on June 23.
