Trump using North Korea to get payments from the South: Etler

US President Donald Trump is like a mafia boss running a protection racket, using North Korea as his enforcer to get payments from the South, says Dennis Etler, an American political analyst who has a decades-long interest in international affairs.

In an interview with Press TV on Wednesday, Etler, a former professor of Anthropology at Cabrillo College in Aptos, California, said, “Trump is often said to be a ‘transactional’ president, meaning that he is not guided by ideology but by practical considerations, in other words, what’s in it for him. Thus, he will change his tune whenever it suits him, if he thinks it gives him an advantage.”

“This may help explain his enigmatic praise of Kim Jong-un and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (aka North Korea). It’s rather perplexing for many to hear Trump heap praise on Kim and the DPRK while in the same breadth he condemns Venezuelan President Maduro and imposes an embargo on his country. Kim is, by Western standards, the unelected hereditary leader of a totalitarian socialist state, while Maduro is the elected leader of a democratic socialist state,” he stated.  

“On the face of it, Trump’s embrace of Kim and disparagement of Maduro seems incongruous. But, that is because there is no logic between the two. Trump doesn’t care one whit about the Korean or Venezuelan people. US sanctions against both North Korea and Venezuela impose great sacrifices on their populations but Trump could care less. He turns a blind eye towards North Korean transgressions because he wants to get something out of his cozying up to Kim, while he will lambaste Maduro for refusing demands that he step down and go into exile, even though a majority of Venezuelans support him, because he wants to grab their oil reserves. There is no principle to Trump’s behavior,” he said.

“So what does explain Trump’s reticence to North Korean missile testing? It seems that Trump is using North Korea as a foil to extort hundreds of millions of dollars from South Korea. In the past, North Korea’s missile tests would have elicited severe repercussions, but now they are brushed off by Trump as insignificant. This shows the South that Trump has the North on a leash and that they better play ball and pony up protection money to keep the peace," he added. 

PressTV-South Korea agrees to pay more money to US: Trump

South Korea “has agreed to pay substantially more money” to the United States “to defend itself” from  North Korea, US President Donald Trump has announced.

Etler said, “As far as the North is concerned, they lose nothing by playing along. It gives them the opportunity to continue with their defensive nuclear arms and ballistic missile build-up, which in the past was the object of Trump’s ire and threats of annihilation."

“Trump, however, is not a great strategic thinker. He may think that his dalliance with Kim will redound in his favor in his dealings with China, but Kim is no fool. He realizes that China is his get out of jail free card and will never throw it away,” he observed.

“The only rationale for Trump’s actions then are that they are what you’d expect from a mafia boss running a protection racket, using the North as his enforcer to get payments from the South. Additionally it lays the foundation for introducing intermediate ballistic missiles in the South to challenge China. The South however would be suicidal to allow that to happen,” he noted.

“The whole charade would have been beyond the grasp of even the most audacious geopolitical novel hitherto written,” Etler concluded.

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