Expectations

Those who immediately criticized the agreement signed by President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at the end of their historic summit in Singapore last Friday as lacking in details are being unfair. Those who criticized Trump for being too concessionary toward Kim afterward are being stupid.

The main thing that emerged from the summit was simply an agreement to move forward together in peace. It was no different from a marriage proposal, of a man dropping a knee before a woman and asking for her hand and the woman saying yes. That is where the Trump-Kim agreement is at the moment.

Whether the proposal ends in an actual marriage is something they still have to arrange. Whether the marriage, if it actually happens, ends in happiness is something they will have to work on. There is nothing Trump, Kim, or anyone else for that matter could have put in detail into that agreement at the time without being preposterous and unrealistic.

The door has only been opened. Nobody has stepped inside. Nobody has the faintest idea what the layout of the room looks like. It can be warm and cozy or it can be cold and inhospitable. That is why there can be no details at the moment because all that will depend on what the situation and circumstances allow.

The only thing that everybody seems to be in agreement with is that nobody ever expected we would be where we are now only a few months ago. Then, Kim was provoking Trump with actual, not threatened, missile launches. The threat was so real that US territory Guam actually sounded off air attack alarms.

And yet here they are, Trump and Kim talking and actually agreeing to something. And yet some people just had to demand details? Just how crazy and unreasonable can they get? Let us all be happy that we even have something to hope for, which is far better than the certainty of constant agitation and fear.

And so what if Trump said good things about Kim and gave away the concession of ending US military exercises with South Korea? To say anything otherwise of someone you just had an agreement with would be uncivilized, unamerican. As to ending the war games, that is to show good faith. And they can be held again if things don’t work out.

Aside from ignoring the fact that Trump and Kim just did what no one ever did before, the naysayers are also completely overlooking the one positive thing that had been gnawing at the consciousness of thousands of American families --the return of the remains of US war dead in North Korea.