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Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

This mindset is so insane to me. You've got one of the biggest foreign policy wins in a long time staring you in the face, and you've got the Korean President, the Japanese President, and the Korean foreign minister all agreeing that the Us Government had a strong hand in making all of this happen.

Somehow that isn't good enough to admit that maybe the country with the biggest military, the largest GDP, and a president who has at least claimed committment to helping find peace in Korea could have had something to do with finding peace in Korea.

What would it take? If Kim Jong Un himself writes a book titled "It was all Trump", then every person in South Korea, China, and Japan all write personal letters to Trump and the American people thanking them, are people still going to entertain these wild conspiracy theories that somehow everybody in the world is lying, and that they have some secret knowledge on this topic?

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Governments, politicians, business leaders, etc. regularly say things out loud to generate a desired perception among the public, when the real underlying reasons are actually different. This is not rare or exceptional — it's the norm. It's called PR. Every public statement is crafted this way.

Thus, every statement by an official should be looked at with a critical eye, and we the public should be analyzing the pieces on the board and the incentives at play to try to deduce the truth for ourselves. Again, this is not rare or exceptional — it's the norm, especially on Hacker News. I'm not sure what you find so insane about this.

What's insane is just believing everything at face value with no understanding of the reasoning behind it. If Yahoo announced a partnership with Facebook and talked about how great a guy Zuckerberg was, would you expect everyone on HN to roll over and say, "It must be true"? Doubtful.

"Trump helped," is not a convincing statement alone. It doesn't imply anything more than, "Trump told us to say he helped." Rather, pointing to specific differences, concessions, deals, etc. that Trump made vs his predecessors would be convincing.

>The only significant thing to change was American policy

Straw man - the above was just objecting to this characterisation of recent SK political changes as insignificant

>The foreign minister is likely smart enough to fluff up the leader of their most critical ally, regardless of how much they feel he contributed internally, and especially when you know that specific foreign leader responds really well to praise.

This is what I'm replying to.

Can you clarify what you object to in that statement?

I think we've all been in a scenario where a manager or group project member gets praised for all their hard work, when everyone in the room knows they didn't do very much.

It's entirely possible this is what South Korea is doing here. Trump's well known to be easy to negotiate with if his ego is stroked, and quick to anger if it isn't. SK risks nothing by praising him, even if it's not fully warranted... and diplomats are pretty used to mouthing bullshit.

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