President Trump has called off the June 12 summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. “Sadly,” the president explained in a letter on Thursday, “based on the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in your most recent statement, I feel it is inappropriate, at this time, to have this long-planned meeting.”

Trump thanked Kim Jong Un “for the release of the hostages who are now home with their families.” The president left the door open “if you change your mind,” but concluded “This missed opportunity is a truly sad moment in history.” Democrats were quick to lock and load and Nancy Pelosi ran right to Kim Jong-un’s corner.

The cancelation was a “good thing” for Kim, said the San Francisco Democrat. “He got global recognition and regard. He’s the big winner. And when he got this letter from the president saying, ‘OK, never mind,’ he must be having a giggle fit right now in North Korea.”

As Charles Schumer saw it, “many of us feared that the summit between POTUS and Kim Jong-Un would be a great show that produced nothing enduring. If a summit is to be reconstituted, the US must show strength & achieve a concrete, verifiable, enduring elimination of Kim Jong-Un’s nuclear capabilities.”

For Bob Menendez, “the art of diplomacy is a lot harder than the art of the deal,” and Virginia Democrat Gerry Conolly tweeted that the Nobel Prize for Trump “will have to wait.” And so on.

As these messages confirm, Democrats did not want the summit to succeed, and do not want to give President Trump credit for anything. This is the posture of a party that never got North Korea anywhere near the bargaining table, and has no problem with the Stalinist regime’s nuclear threats.

As POTUS 44’s national security advisor Susan Rice said, “History shows that we can, if we must, tolerate nuclear weapons in North Korea — the same way we tolerated the far greater threat of thousands of Soviet nuclear weapons during the Cold War.” There’s a back story here that people ought to know.

The left’s bible on North Korea is The Hidden History of the Korean War, which charged that South Korea invaded North Korea. That was the official Soviet position, and no surprise from author I.F. Stone. According to the New York Times, Stone was an “independent, radical pamphleteer of American journalism.”

As John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev explain in Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, Stone was in fact a Soviet agent who took money from the KGB. He made a career of recycling Communist propaganda but “by the time he died in 1989, I.F. Stone had been installed in the pantheon of left-wing heroes as a symbol of rectitude and a teller of truth to power.”

Stone’s legacy explains fatuous headlines such as “Kim Jong-un’s Sister Turns On the Charm, Taking Pence’s Spotlight,” from the New York Times. For the Washington Post, Kim Yo-jong, was the “Ivanka Trump of North Korea,” the captivating “political princess” of the Winter Olympics. And NBC’s Lester Holt swooned over the regime’s Potemkin ski resort, ignoring the actual record of the hereditary Stalinist regime.

Under Kim Il-sung, who launched the 1950 invasion, North Korea built up nuclear reactors, but it was his son Kim Jong-il, who took over in 1994, who advanced the nuclear weapons program while denying that the regime even had one. In 2003, North Korea backed out of the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. In 2005 North Korea acknowledged it had nuclear weapons and in 2006 the Communist regime tested its first nuclear device. The Stalinist regime was also busy on the chemical side.

As Gordon Thomas noted in Secret Wars, the Soviets’ Biopreparat project weaponized “huge quantities” of the India-1 strain of smallpox, resistant to vaccines. That caught the attention of Dr. Yi Yong Su, who headed North Korea’s Institute 398 at Sokam-ri. There she created organisms designed to attack food crops and human immune and nervous systems.

Kim Jong-Il kicked off in 2011 and the reigns passed to Kim Jong-un, who has busied himself assassinating relatives such as half-brother Kim Jong-nam. In February 2017, at the airport in Kuala Lampur, North Korean agents sprayed him with a mysterious liquid.

That year, North Korea attained the ability to threaten the United States with an intercontinental ballistic missile. That prompted President Trump to tell “Rocket Man” that he was on “a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.” As the president said, “the United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.”

That got Rocket Man’s attention and this year he became the first member of the Stalinist dynasty to set foot in South Korea. That spurred hopes for a summit with President Trump and the prospect of a nuclear-free Korean peninsula. But it was always a long shot that Kim Jong-un would give up the nuclear weapons that made him a player.

As the president knows, in any conflict the party with the weaker force has two choices: bluff or fold. For President Trump, that is not acceptable.

Maybe a summit “will happen later,” as the president said, but in the meantime, “our military, which is by far the most powerful anywhere in the world, is ready if necessary.”