“Our propositions are hard-headed. We could call it ‘no-no’. You do not test any more long-range missiles. They make people nervous in Japan when they fly overhead. Guam too, even Hawaii. Some people in California think they might even get there. I don’t need any nervous people around. In exchange, we stop having war games on your frontier which makes you nervous. Look, you know we’ve got soldiers, lots of them, sitting around doing nothing. I can’t even put them on the frontier to shoot Mexican rapists, but if we have to, we can move them. So we say, no more war games, but you know that if you attack South Korea as you did in 1950, we can get troops in the field fast. We don’t have any melodramatic active generals like MacArthur any more, but we might have some in reserve.

“Next we look at your economy and what we can do for it. Look, I know that we have sanctions. They are not going to go away all at once. Some are sanctions voted by the U.N. and some by our Congress. Some people in Congress are a real pain in the ass as we say, and I have to do things in several steps. But I think that your country has real potential. Just look around here in Hanoi, at the crowds at Starbucks. We couldn’t have more American products on sale here if we had won the war. So let some of our investment-people look at your economy, see where there are bottlenecks that have to be removed. Trade between our countries can increase. There is not a hell of a lot that we want to import from you, but I hear that you have nice beaches and