Some critics have knocked President Trump for making “too many concessions” to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un at the historic Singapore Summit – the first-ever meeting between a U.S. president and North Korean leader.<\/p>\n
Trump’s foreign policy instincts have had me white-knuckled for the past year and a half. But against a backdrop of possible nuclear war, it would be overly cynical not to recognize the meeting\u2019s potential for good.<\/p>\n
At best, the meeting set the stage for North Korea\u2019s denuclearization – and possibly even an end<\/a> to the nearly 70-year-old, stalemated Korean War. If you\u2019re against war, this is a good development.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Just six months ago, reasonable people had reasonable fears of the world\u2019s first two-sided nuclear war, as President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un traded middle-school insults<\/a> and flaunted their nuclear arsenals.<\/p>\n There are still countless ways the negotiations could go wrong, and real reasons to fear that hardline members of the administration<\/a> – and its opposition<\/a>, too – would allow that to happen. But diplomacy offers chances for bigger gains, and smaller losses, than war.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, the US spends more than 20 times more on war and militarism than we do on diplomacy each year.<\/p>\n Our choices have been stark.<\/p>\n The US chose war in Iraq over diplomacy in 2003. Our leaders chose certain risk over likely rewards by pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal. And they chose a lone plunge backward over a carefully planned march forward when they stepped back from the Paris climate accord before that.<\/p>\n This must not happen when it comes to the North Korea negotiations.<\/p>\n The costs of war are horrifying. The current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost the US$5.6 trillion<\/a>, and 6,800 US soldiers have lost their lives<\/a>. That doesn\u2019t include non-fatal casualties, or the human and economic costs of PTSD and family stress that echo far beyond the battlefield.<\/p>\n And it doesn\u2019t count the hundreds of thousands<\/a> of innocent civilians who have been needlessly killed throughout our warzones. A full-scale war with North Korea would likely be many times worse<\/a>.<\/p>\n The North Korea negotiations are far from over, and could still tip from a fragile diplomacy back to middle-school insults and perhaps even to war. But we can and should be more optimistic than that. Diplomacy isn’t just the better way. It\u2019s the only way.<\/p>\n For the Korean talks to work, this administration will have to value diplomacy more than it did in its narrow-minded rejection of the Iran deal. It will have to value diplomacy more than it did when it pulled out of the Paris climate agreement.<\/p>\n There\u2019s so much to gain from open communication and keeping our word. And there\u2019s so much more to lose if we allow things to fall apart.<\/p>\n