Monday on CNN’s “The Situation Room,” Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) said the country doesn’t need “made for TV moments” instead of diplomacy at the upcoming summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Menendez said, “Listen, I want the president to succeed, but I’m deeply skeptical that the president, based upon his first summit with Kim Jong Un, is headed in the wrong direction.”
He continued, “At the end of the day, we don’t need a made-for-tv moment. We need a verifiable, enforceable, denuclearization, which means the elimination of all of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, the infrastructure that supports those weapons and ballistic missiles and verifiable regime to make sure that is the case. The president walked away from the first summit without even a definition of what the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula is. So we’re going to a second summit in which there isn’t an agreement. The jumping off point by which you’d seek to seek all the other elements of an agreement.”
He added, “I worry that the president wants made-for-TV moments. I worry that he’s dumbing down diplomacy at the end of the day and I am worried that for the sake of declaring a victory, he will give too much.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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