First Date

President Trump’s meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un this past week reminded me why I make a conscious effort not to watch cable news. Liberal outlets have gone to great lengths to minimize the importance of the meeting, some even portraying the event as an embarrassing failure, while conservative media has done the exact opposite.

Objectively speaking, North Korea can shoot a nuclear missile at about any American city it wants. That reality is unacceptable, and so it’s the job of the American President to do everything he can to keep that from ever happening, even if it means flying to Singapore to shake hands—repeatedly—with a quantifiably evil person. Granted, it is a sad day when an American President has to make such a concession, but this is 2018, not 1988, so let’s zip up our fanny packs and move on.

To use an analogy that will likely invoke nausea, Tuesday’s meeting was the first date, not the wedding night. It was not supposed to be the wedding night, and just because it wasn’t the wedding night doesn’t mean it was a failure. You have to have the first date to get to the wedding night, which, in this analogy, would be a completely denuclearized North Korea.

We shouldn’t be upset that after the “first date” there’s no engagement ring. However, we should also not go around and tell people there’s going to be a wedding.  It’s simply the first step in a very long and dangerous process.