The summit has resulted in hope for the Korean people

The Post-Gazette editorial “A North Korea Opening” (June 13) on the U.S.-North Korea negotiations was an excellent piece. My wife is Korean and thus many of our friends are Korean.

It is interesting to see the completely different perspective the Korean news and many of the Korean people have concerning the summit versus the U.S. news. The Korean news leans more toward hope and optimism and, of course, caution.

Most of the U.S. news seems to lean more toward negativism as shown by the Nicholas Kristof column, “Advantage, Kim Jong Un” (June 13 Perspectives). The U.S. seems to want to make this a contest between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un.

Mr. Kristof states that Mr. Kim won because Mr. Trump “legitimized” the North Korean regime and that Mr. Trump called off the “war games” scheduled for August while Mr. Trump got nothing in return. I think any reasonable person can agree that no matter what the U.S. says about Mr. Kim, he is the leader of North Korea and to have peace he must be dealt with. The “war games” in August are usually computer simulation exercises for the command structure in Korea. These can obviously be restarted at any time.

The PG editorial goes past all the Trump vs. Kim debate to the big picture. For more than 60 years, we have been dealing with North Korea the same way. This has led to 60 years of failure. There is still a state of war in Korea, still the country is divided and families separated by a militarized border, and now North Korea has nuclear weapons. The Korean people have endured all this and now see some ray of hope to maybe start a process to end it.

As the editorial stated: There are no guarantees and there surely will be setbacks, but this is surely an important and amazing step forward. I hope all the “Korean experts” who are just looking at the negative can give the summit and peace a chance. BOB UPTON

Marshall