Trump Bet He Could Isolate Iran and Charm North Korea. It's Not That Easy.
President Trump entered the new year facing flare-ups of long-burning crises with two old adversaries — Iran and North Korea — that are directly challenging his claim to have reasserted American power around the world.
While the Iranian-backed attack on the United States Embassy in Baghdad seemed to be under control, it played to Mr. Trump’s longtime worry that American diplomats and troops in the Middle East are easy targets and his longtime position that the United States must pull back from the region.
In North Korea, Kim Jong-un’s declaration on Wednesday that the world would “witness a new strategic weapon” seemed to be the end of an 18-month experiment in which Mr. Trump believed his force of personality — and vague promises of economic development — would wipe away a problem that plagued the last 12 of his predecessors.
The timing of these new challenges is critical: Both the Iranians and the North Koreans seem to sense the vulnerability of a president under impeachment and facing re-election, even if they are often clumsy as they try to play those events to their advantage.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/trump-bet-he-could-isolate-iran-and-charm-north-korea-it-s-not-that-easy/ar-BBYwzN6?ocid=msn360
So Trumpy's going to use North Korea and Iran as a reason he shouldn't be impeached.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Even the most seasoned State Department careerists are hesitant to recommend just one course of action. Relations with "hostile" countries is especially fraught with unintended consequences, because one of the chief considerations is what is their priority? That is, what's most important to Iran or North Korea?
Iran would love to be back in the community of nations, and signing on to the Iran nuclear deal was an important step on that path. Then, along comes Donald Dunderhead, who tries to topple the whole thing because . . . well, nobody really knows why. Maybe because the deal was put together by Obama, whom Trump can't stand? Because it's a deal that was in place when he took office, and his particular pathology is that he can deal better than anyone else on the planet, even when he doesn't understand anything about the deal? 
As for North Korea, the Kim family has been obsessed with being perceived as legitimate for - literally - generations. The United States and its allies have, for a lot of various reasons, denied the Kim regime any legitimacy on the world stage. Enter Donald Dunderhead, who meets and negotiates directly with Kim, conferring that legitimacy in one poorly-considered move. North Korea really doesn't need anything else out of the Trump administration, because they've gotten what they wanted already. That doesn't mean that Kim and his staff don't relish chumping the United States again and again, knowing that Trump will do anything to try to make a deal with them. So they set that football up again and again, knowing that Trump will come running.
