‘Russia, China, N. Korea eager to find common ground, but US push for superiority ruins everything’

29 Jun, 2019 19:54 / Updated 5 years ago

Donald Trump said a lot of good things on Russia, China and North Korea during the G20 summit, but there’s no guarantee he won’t announce that he’s changed his mind in a tweet next week, analysts have told RT.

“The outcomes are always good whenever President Trump meets world leaders, be it Putin, Xi Jinping or North Korean [Kim Jong-un],” political analyst Andre Vltchek commented, speaking on the outcome of the high-profile gathering in Osaka but noting that, in a week or a month, Trump could wake up and tweet something on Venezuela, North Korea that completely contradicts his earlier words.

“There was a lot of theatrics going on” at the G20, Paul Ingram, executive director of the British American Security Information Council, pointed out.

Donald Trump was saying a lot of things that were clearly designed to make the headlines. But what’s really going on underneath here is anybody’s guess.

Regardless of what path the US leader chooses next, it’s already important that Moscow and Washington are talking, especially, on such important issue as arms control, Ingram said. With the US already withdrawing from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) and considering ditching the New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty), “the likelihood is that we could easily have deployments of new nuclear-capable missiles in Europe, which is terrifying many European countries right now.”

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Trump pulling out of those landmark non-proliferation deals shows that there’s “no awareness in the US president’s head about how much effort it takes to negotiate these treaties,” he added.

After the INF withdrawal, “I don’t know how much Russia can still trust the US,” Vltchek cautioned.

Obviously, Russia has no other choice but to try its best, for the sake of its own people and for the sake of the world, to push the US to negotiate.

Vltchek believes that “the most important [thing now] is to keep Donald Trump as optimistic for at least one year, until the next ‘great’ meeting between him and Putin will happen, on May 9, 2020.” During the G20, Vladimir Putin invited his US counterpart to come to Moscow for next spring’s Victory Day celebrations, and Trump reportedly “responded very positively” to the idea.

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While in Osaka, Trump again declared his willingness to solve the US-Korea deadlock, even saying that he wanted to meet Kim at the demilitarized zone between the South and the North of the peninsula. the Korean settlement “requires more than chummy personal relations between the [Trump and Kim],” Ingram warned, noting the process needs “understanding the pathways that lead a country like north Korea to acquire nuclear weapons.”

Washington’s behavior in the Korean negotiations is the same behavior that prevents resolution of other disputes worldwide, Vltchek stressed. “All the doors are open – from Russia, from China, from North Korea… their leaders are willing to negotiate. It’s always the US which backs up and starts to push for its either economical superiority or – I hate to use the word – for its imperialist interests.”

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“Diplomacy is much better than war or conflict… but behind the rhetoric is always national interests,” political analyst Andrew Leung pointed out. The aspirations of Washington, Moscow and Beijing are different, so “common ground [must be found], but then, of course, the Trump administration believes that America has dominating strength on many fronts and it’s prepared to use this strength to push the envelope for ‘America first.’”

“Trumping this kind of attitude that the strong dictates the policies and the weak has simply to obey doesn’t sit well with many other countries,” Leung warned.

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