Trump seeks to turn North Korea into a vassal state

“The US wants to not only denuclearize the Korean Peninsula but disarm the North and make it a vassal state of the [US] empire,” said Dennis Etler, a former professor of Anthropology at Cabrillo College in Aptos, California.

“What they envision is converting the DPRK into a Northeast Asian version of Vietnam. The US wants to use its rapprochement with the DPRK in the same way it is trying to use Vietnam as a surrogate for its anti-China policies in Southeast Asia,” Etler said.

“What Trump and his handlers are attempting to do is a long-shot, with very little hope of success,” he added.

“Negotiations will most likely stretch out over an extended period of time placing the whole process in a sort of limbo, basically putting it on the back burner so the US can concentrate on its attempts to push its imperialist agenda against China, Iran and whoever else stands in its way as it attempts to reassert its global hegemony, a task which, however, is doomed to failure.”

The United States has devised a plan to demolish North Korea's nuclear weapons program within a year, White House National Security Adviser John Bolton said Sunday.

In an interview with CBS's "Face the Nation," Bolton claimed that Washington also has a plan to dismantle North Korea's chemical and biological weapons programs as well as ballistic missile programs within a year.

The comments come following Trump’s landmark summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore on June 12.

In the Singapore summit, the US and North Korea committed to working “toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” Trump later said he would end the “provocative” US-South Korea military exercises, and the two countries proceeded to suspend a range of their “large-scale” military drills.

“Unlike the Iranian nuclear deal, which took years to negotiate by a multi-national coalition, has well articulated provisions and has been fully implemented by Iran and verified by international inspectors, the North Korea denuclearization deal is a mere scrap of paper with no substance other than the 'word’ of its signatories,” Etler said.