John Kerry's delusional advice to Trump

Eli Lake:

John Kerry has some advice for Donald Trump this week on his presidential visit to Asia: Calm down the rhetoric.

In an interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour, the former secretary of state said the president should stop "feeding into North Korea's fear of regime change, or of you know -- a unilateral attack."

"I think the rhetoric to date has frankly stepped over the line with respect to the messages that are being sent," Kerry said. "It’s given North Korea a reason to say ‘Hey we need a bomb because if we don’t have a bomb, we’re going to — you know — not be able to protect themselves and they’ll come after us.' ”

It's worth lingering over that last sentence. Perhaps Kerry was too focused on the Iran nuclear deal to notice, but North Korea already has a nuclear bomb.

It first tested a nuclear device underground 11 years ago in 2006. It tested again on May 25, 2009. That one was hard to miss. It came just seven weeks after Barack Obama delivered his famous speech in Prague sharing his vision for a world without nuclear weapons. The North Koreans tested three more times during the Obama presidency, all during Kerry's tenure as secretary of state. Is that because Obama fed into the regime's fear of regime change? Was his policy of "strategic patience" spurring Pyongyang to keep perfecting atomic weapons?

Of course not. Nonetheless, on Monday in Japan, Trump repeated his administration's policy that the "era of strategic patience is over."
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The problem with diplomacy with the North Koreans is that their word is no good and the chances of them agreeing to verification of any deal are close to nil.  Someone should tell John Kerry that the horse is already out of the barn and it happened on his watch when he and Obama were being really nice to Kim.  It did not work.