Trump, Kim Resort to Name-Calling as Tensions Rise

'Rocket Man' very displeased with remarks from 'senile dotard'

With a year-end deadline for resuming talks fast approaching, the US and North Korea don’t appear to have any solid idea how they could get back to successful negotiations. They have, however, gotten really good at calling each other names.

President Trump is back to firing off screeds about “Rocket Man” Kim Jong Un, while claiming that he, Trump, may be Kim’s only friend on the entire planet, and also threatened to further isolate him.

North Korea responded by saying Kim was “displeased with the undesirable remark,” and that Trump is showing “the senility of a dotard.”

This calls back to the hostility between the US and North Korean officials in 2017, when both were trading name-calling as a matter of course, and did so as seemingly the only bilateral engagement.

Though North Korea has said they’d be open to new talks if the US was willing to meet them on an equal footing and work toward mutually beneficial deals, the signs are that this isn’t going to happen, and that the US and North Korea are just going back to pre-diplomacy norms.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.