With a new president on the way into office all sorts of people are coming out of the woodwork to stake out their position in the new power structure. One of the strangest calls that the President Elect may be getting, however, could be coming from Pyongyang. Word on the international diplomacy street is that North Korea’s diminutive dictator, Kim Jong Un, would like to negotiate some sort of peace deal with Donald Trump and move toward normalized relations. Or at least that’s what he’s signaling this week. Who can ever tell with that madman? Of course, the price he’d like to charge for this new, “reasonable” position is through the roof. (US News)

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un wants a peace treaty with the United States, as long as it accedes to Pyongyang’s primary goal: nuclear weapons.

“What does Kim Jong Un want? … He wants a peace treaty with the United States as a nuclear weapons state. I think that’s what he wants,” said Dr. Victor Cha, the Korea chair for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, speaking Thursday at that organization’s security forum in Washington.

North Korea nuclear proliferation remains one of the international community’s most precarious challenges. President Barack Obama reportedly told President-elect Donald Trump earlier this month that a nuclear North Korea is the top security issue the United States faces.

It might be interesting for Trump to actually take a call from Kim if only to have the chance to hang up on him. First of all, North Korea’s record on sticking to any agreements they make is, to put it kindly, less than impressive. The Washington Post published a brief history of Pyongyang’s long history of broken promises on the nuclear weapons front earlier this year which really tells you all you need to know. They joined the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1984 at the urging of the Soviet Union and almost immediately began rejecting IAEA inspectors from their nuclear facilities. After blaming their failure to comply on the United States (for keeping nukes on the southern end of their peninsula) we pulled our weapons out as part of a deal with Moscow and North Korea was supposedly back on board. That deal also fell apart in a matter on months until Bill Clinton brokered yet another deal with them in 1994. The number of bombs they’ve tested since then shows you how well that worked out.

North Korea wants resources – specifically food – from suppliers other than China. That need leads them to make promises to other countries which they have no intention of keeping. As soon as they get what they want they move on to flip the bird at the rest of the world. I certainly hope that Donald Trump is smart enough not to fall for this bait and switch routine yet again. If Kim wants to cut a deal he should be the one putting one heck of a lot on the table (including all of his nuclear material on a ship heading for China) before he gets a single pound of additional rice.