President Donald Trump traveled to Singapore for a historic meeting with the dictator Kim Jung Un from North Korea. This was the first time an American president has met with Kim. The photograph of the two men shaking hands in front of their national flags. According to deepenglish.com, the handshake has become so ubiquitous that you may never have thought about why people shake hands. The history of the handshake dates back to the 5th century B.C. in Greece. It was a symbol of peace, showing that neither person was carrying a weapon. During the Roman era, the handshake was actually more of an arm grab.
Unfortunately, because of the hate by the left of anything that President Trump does, the social media sites were full of accusatory pictures and remarks that an American president should never shake hands with such an evil dictator. Perhaps it is time to take a look at history.
Joseph Stalin was a dictator, and murdered between 3 million and 9 million of his own people. Some estimate that the total could be as high as 25 million; an unbelievable number. Yet both President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill from England met with Stalin. The result of that meeting was that Stalin and the Soviet Union was given control of all Eastern Europe, creating the Communist Bloc and imprisoning millions in countries throughout Eastern Europe, including East Germany.
Nikita Khrushchev was a dictator, ruling the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe with an iron fist, blocking free passage from those oppressed countries and imprisoning his political enemies and supporting hostile regimes throughout the world, including Cuba. President Kennedy met with Khrushchev and shook his hand. While Kennedy stood up to Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis, he was unable to accomplish much regarding the Berlin Wall not the ongoing rule over those Eastern European countries.
Mao Zedong was without a doubt a dictator, According to an article in the Washington Post August of 2016, From 1958 to 1962, his Great Leap Forward policy led to the deaths of up to 45 million people – easily making it the biggest episode of mass murder ever recorded. Yet President Richard Nixon opened communications with China, and visited the closed country. This opened a new dialogue as well as opened new markets to American products. The tensions between the country and America lowered and over time, even though remaining political communist, 
China adopted many capitalists ways for its economy. That visit has helped create the second largest economy in the world, second only to that of the United States.
Leonid Brezhnev was a dictator, as was all leaders of the Soviet Union. Yet Jimmy Carter met with him, Nothing positive ever came from Carter’s meetings with Soviet leaders because he was weak and avoided confrontation.
As all other Soviet leaders, Mikhail Gorbachev was in essence a dictator. Ronald Reagan met with Gorbachev on a number of occasions and used America’s superior economic strength to demonstrate to the Soviet Union that they could not win in an arms race against the United States. These meetings, even though with a dictator, resulted in the fall of the Berlin Wall and ultimately the end of the Iron Curtain and the freedom of Eastern European countries like Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia and others.
Both of the Bush presidents and Bill Clinton met with leaders of foreign countries that could be considered dictatorships, although most of those countries were not as poor on human rights as the ones previously mentioned in this article.
Barack Obama and members of his administration also have a history of meeting with dictators. In April, 2009, Obama met and shook hands with Hugo Chaves, the communist dictator of Venezuela. Obama defended that meeting by saying that the United States, with its overwhelming military superiority and need to improve its global image, could afford to extend such diplomatic “courtesy.” The result of that courtesy has been an even more oppressed citizenry of Venezuela and the continued reduction of human rights in that country.
Obama also met with Putin, and shortly before his 2012 re-election was caught on an open microphone saying to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, “This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.” “I understand,” Medvedev told Obama. “I will transmit this information to Vladimir.” This was another show of weakness.
Raul Castro and his older brother were both dictators, and ruled Cuba with an Iron hand for over 55 years, guilty of horrendous human rights violations. Yet, when Obama went to Cuba and joined Castro at a baseball game, the N.Y. Times said, “Obama Meets Raúl Castro, Making History”. Yet nothing was achieved, and the population under the communist regime remains as repressive as ever.
As far as Russia is concerned, Obama’s weakness has allowed Russia to annex Crimea, continue to threaten Ukraine, and has allowed Russia to dramatically increase its influence in the Middle East through its alliance with Iran. In an age of attempting to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons spread to other countries, the best that Obama and John Kerry could do was to give Iran a “time-out” on the production of nuclear weapons, while at the same time giving Iran billions of dollars that they are now using to finance terrorists and continue to build their missile delivery systems.
Now, President Trump has made an effort to bring some peace to the Korean peninsula by meeting with Kim Jong Un where he could express himself directly, the left, who only a few months ago were crying that Trump was going to start a nuclear war with N. Korea, are now abhorred with the though of an American president shaking hands with a dictator. Can you spell hypocrisy?
Will anything positive come from the meeting between Trump and Kim? Only time will tell, but the result can’t be any worse than what has been accomplished over the past four administrations. Rather than nit picking the meeting, it might be wise if everyone supported a positive result. Based on history, the Republicans meetings with dictatorial leaders has led to much more positive results from a position of strength than have democrats have from a position of appeasement.
