Now that the deal has collapsed, some experts expect North Korea to do something provocative in the fall to punish Trump during the political campaign.
WASHINGTON — North Korea officially declared an end Friday to its diplomatic dalliance with the U.S. But experts say it’s been clear for some time that President Donald Trump’s bold but risky effort to sweet talk Kim Jong Un into relinquishing his nuclear weapons never really went anywhere.
Two high-profile meetings with North Korea’s leader bought Trump a hiatus from bellicose rhetoric and nuclear tests, but Kim never stopped building nuclear warheads and the missiles to deliver them, U.S. intelligence officials and private analysts say.
Now, on the second anniversary of that first Trump-Kim summit in Singapore, North Korea is renouncing the diplomacy while promising to expand its weapons program, even as experts say it is ever closer to perfecting a long-range missile capable of reaching and destroying an American city.
Trump therefore joins a long list of presidents who tried and failed to cut a deal to get rid of North Korean nuclear weapons — but the first one who met face to face with the leader of the outlaw regime, lending it a measure of legitimacy. Trump at one point mused that he and Kim “fell in love,” and he showered praise on a dictator who is said by human rights groups to keep tens of thousands of political prisoners in vast gulags.
Trump made a series of other concessions, including the unilateral cancellation of joint U.S. and South Korean missile exercises. He got very little in return.
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Who told you waaaaaaaay back in 2017 this was going to end badly?
Me, that's who.https://t.co/d9gX54RuJI
— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) June 14, 2020
We can add Trump’s inability to negotiate a deal with Kim to his long list of failures as president, but then again, failure here was expected. North Korea is an enemy who wants to destroy us and you don’t negotiate with such an enemy.
Never mind Art of the Deal. Trump does not know how to negotiate a deal anyway. His idea of negotiating is to bully the other party. Bullying isn’t going to work on Kim –hello? — he has nuclear weapons. So Trump tried flattery and slobbering over his opposition. But for Kim, all that schmoozing only showed Trump as weak. So maybe Kim agreed to a few things — Trump said he did, but I never saw a formal agreement — but whatever was agreed upon was forgotten before Trump boarded the plane to come home.
These negotiations were much like Neville Chamberlain negotiating with Hitler. Praising Kim, flattering him, giving concessions — we saw how well all that worked with Hitler. What would make Trump think it would work with Kim?
And really, I don’t believe Trump was ever really serious about negotiating a deal with Kim. For this reality tv president, it was all about image — making Trump look good to his worshipers. Trump does nothing that doesn’t benefit himself.
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