FROM EIR DAILY ALERT

North Korea’s Kim Jong-un Is on His Way to Hanoi for Feb. 27-28 Summit with President Trump

Feb. 24, 2018 (EIRNS)—China’s Global Times reports that Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s travel plans are secretive, but there are indications that he has already departed Pyongyang for Hanoi, traveling in his special train first to China. He reportedly crossed the border with China yesterday, and is expected to arrive in Beijing on Sunday, Feb. 24. The whole trek, if he does it by train, is 4,500 km long, and would take over 48 hours, so there is speculation he may fly for part of the route.

President Donald Trump tweeted today that he was optimistic about the prospects of the summit. And Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with Vietnamese and Chinese TV channels today that the U.S. and Russia were consulting on the upcoming Trump-Kim summit: “I’m not going to make a secret of it: U.S. officials responsible for preparing the summit are consulting with us,” Lavrov told Vietnam’s national broadcaster Vietnam Television (VTV), and China’s CCTV and Phoenix TV. “We also maintain a permanent contact with our North Korean friends. Motivated by a sincere desire to be helpful, we are expressing our recommendations regarding how results can be achieved.”

Meanwhile the media mice and others in the West are trying to whip up scenarios about how the Feb. 27-28 summit could be a fiasco. For example, Fox News is concerned that “The nightmare scenario heading into the second summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un isn’t so much ‘fire and fury and millions dead.’ Rather, some experts fear the meeting could result in an ill-considered deal that allows North Korea to get everything it wants while giving up very little, even as the mercurial leaders trumpet a blockbuster nuclear success.”

Who is “concerned” about such an outbreak of peace? Fox cites the proverbial “growing chorus of experts,” all unnamed, that worry Trump could

“ignore his more cautious aides and try to strike a deal that’s cobbled together on the fly with little preparatory work.... For Trump, such a deal could generate a much-needed rush of ‘breakthrough’ headlines to help distract from swirling investigations in Washington while helping assure his supporters that he’s protecting the American mainland.”

(How’s that for standing causality on its head?)

The North Korean news agency KCNA, for its part, warned against attempts to derail the summit:

“If the upcoming D.P.R.K.-U.S. negotiations end without results as wished by the opponent forces, the U.S. people will never be cleared of the security threats that threw them into panic, and then responsibility will be placed on those due.”