Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Tuesday morning that President Donald Trump should not engage directly in the details of negotiation with North Korea.
“First of all, don’t try to negotiate the details with Kim Jong-un,” Rice told Fox & Friends. “Leave that for people who understand all the nuances of the situation.”
Rice noted that she was the last American to negotiate with the North Korean regime, when she was dealing with Kim Jong-un’s father, Kim Jong-il.
“You have to give the [Trump] administration a lot of credit,” she said, for pressuring China to rein in the Kim regime and for using the threat of military force to isolate North Korea.
However, she said, the president should leave the nuts-and-bolts of diplomacy to others, even though he would be meeting directly with Kim Jong-un at a summit in the coming weeks. And she warned that the Kim regime was still a murderous one with a track record of breaking its promises.
Rice said she supported the Trump administration’s move toward pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal.
“I actually think if we pull out now, it is not going to be the disaster everybody is talking about,” she said. “I would not have signed this deal. I don’t think it was a very good deal. I think we were in a hurry to get a deal and we left a lot on the table. … If we get out of this deal, it is going to be just fine.”
Asked whether she wanted to leave the Iran deal, Rice said: “I would probably have stayed in for alliance management purposes but … if the president decides to pull out of the deal I have no argument with that.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named to Forward’s 50 “most influential” Jews in 2017. He is the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.