{"id":179868,"date":"2017-10-01T19:35:00","date_gmt":"2017-10-02T00:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2017\/10\/01\/common-sense-that-i-did-not-expect-out-of-state\/"},"modified":"2017-10-01T19:35:00","modified_gmt":"2017-10-02T00:35:00","slug":"common-sense-that-i-did-not-expect-out-of-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2017\/10\/01\/common-sense-that-i-did-not-expect-out-of-state\/","title":{"rendered":"Common Sense That I Did Not Expect out of State"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>But reports that there are <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/09\/30\/world\/asia\/us-north-korea-tillerson.html\">direct contacts between the US and the DPRK<\/a> is an indication of at least a small modicum of sanity in Foggy Bottom:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">The Trump administration acknowledged on Saturday for the first time that it was in direct communication with the government of North Korea over its missile and nuclear tests, seeking a possible way forward beyond the escalating threats of a military confrontation from both sides.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u201cWe are probing, so stay tuned,\u201d Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson said, when pressed about how he might begin a conversation with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, that could avert what many government officials fear is a significant chance of open conflict between the two countries.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u201cWe ask, \u2018Would you like to talk?\u2019 We have lines of communications to Pyongyang \u2014 we\u2019re not in a dark situation, a blackout,\u201d he added. \u201cWe have a couple, three channels open to Pyongyang,\u201d a reference to North Korea\u2019s capital.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Considering the fact that the US and the DPRK are the principals in their dispute, direct contacts are a good thing, even if it runs against the standard US regime change consensus among the DC cognoscenti.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>But reports that there are direct contacts between the US and the DPRK is an indication of at least a small modicum of sanity in Foggy Bottom: The Trump administration acknowledged on Saturday for the first time that it was in direct communication with the government of North Korea over its missile and nuclear tests, &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[543,545,394],"class_list":["post-179868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-dprk","tag-far-east","tag-foreign-relations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179868"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179868"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179868\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}