283 — The Irreversible

Kim Jong Un has declared North Korea's nuclear status irreversible. The word is "irreversible." It means it cannot be reversed. The United States has spent thirty years attempting to reverse it.

The efforts have had different names at different times. The Agreed Framework. The Six-Party Talks. The Singapore Summit. The Hanoi Summit. The period when Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un exchanged letters they both described as love letters (this is what they called them, in public, on the record). Each of these was, at the time, described as progress.

Some of the efforts involved people traveling to North Korea. Warren Christopher went. Madeleine Albright went. She brought a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue. Kim Jong Il drank it. The nuclear program continued. Rex Tillerson went. Mike Pompeo went twice. Bill Richardson went several times before that. The State Department has a category for this kind of trip. The category does not have a word for when the trip does not work, because the trips always do not work, and it would be wasteful to name a permanent condition.

Kim Jong Un did not say the nuclear status was permanent, ongoing, settled, complete, fixed, established, or final. He said irreversible. The word is specific. Irreversible implies there was a direction things were going, and the direction has now been determined. The thing doing the reversing was the United States. The United States has been informed.

This is a Saturday announcement. The State Department does not respond to Saturday announcements before reviewing them on Monday. Monday reviews are not irreversible.