His quixotic effort to make nice with the world’s strangest regime was always a long shot
No diplomats anywhere enjoy dealing with North Korea. Pyongyang is difficult, indeed obstreperous at the best of times, while the Kim dynasty and its emissaries are notorious worldwide for their aggressive and undiplomatic trash-talking when they are displeased. Which they frequently are.
Donald Trump’s quixotic effort to make nice with the world’s strangest regime was therefore always a long shot, while his desire to denuclearize North Korea in exchange for diplomatic normalization and economic development was based in what can be kindly called fantasy thinking.
That has just been made painfully evident in Hanoi, where the much-ballyhooed second summit between President Trump and the North Korean strongman Kim Jong-un fell apart with no deal of any kind. After investing a considerable amount of his personal prestige, and that of the United States, in building a relationship with Kim, Trump is flying back to Washington, DC, with nothing. His reality-TV-based notion of how to solve intractable diplomatic problems has been revealed as just another Trumpian sham, alongside Don’s vodka, his steaks, and his ‘university’.
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Trump went public first, explaining that the collapse of the talks was on Pyongyang: ‘Basically they wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety and we couldn’t do that,’ Trump said in Hanoi before heading home, empty-handed. In exchange for shutting down their main nuclear complex at Yongbyon, the North Koreans demanded full sanctions relief, and that was too much for the American side to accept. ‘Sometimes you have to walk, and this was just one of those times,’ the president explained on a down note.
Then, in a rare midnight press conference, North Korea’s foreign minister fired back, explaining that the American president was lying. In Hanoi, Ri Yong-ho stated that, in fact, Pyongyang only wanted partial sanctions relief, specifically on five of the 11 sanctions applied to his country by the UN Security Council. In exchange, Ri elaborated, North Korea would allow US inspectors to observe the dismantling of the Yongbyon complex. Ri then ended his country’s dialogue with Trump with direct language: ‘It became crystal clear that the United States was not willing to accept our proposal. Our proposal will never be changed, even though the United States proposes negotiation again in the future.’
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Make no mistake here: Ri’s midnight presser is one for the history books. It’s difficult to think of any US president being publicly humiliated in such a fashion as this. Of course, anybody even vaguely acquainted with North Korean antics (the president clearly wasn’t one of them) should have anticipated that Pyongyang would not play by standard international rules. If Trump had paid attention to briefings by his Intelligence Community, which he famously does not, this unprecedented diplomatic debacle could have been easily avoided.
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Pyongyang knows that possessing nuclear weapons, even just a handful, is the only reliable insurance against American-led ‘regime change.’ The Kims learned from now-dead Saddam Hussein that if Washington, DC hates you and you don’t possess nuclear weapons, you’re doomed (and the worst thing you can do is fool the Americans into thinking you have ‘the bomb’ when you don’t). They learned from now-dead Muammar Gaddafi that American promises are no good, and it’s stupid to give up any of your weapons of mass destruction in exchange for empty Washington guarantees which won’t be worth the paper they’re printed on.
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"The truly unhinged element of all this was the grandiose magical thinking in the Oval Office in the first place that was driving Trump’s mistaken belief that he could outfox the Kims at anything."https://t.co/E0oyfumEeg
— John Schindler (@20committee) February 28, 2019
Trump humiliated himself and embarrassed the US. Not that his supporters would notice.
Among the more telling moments of Trump's failed summit press conference was this exchange with a South Korean reporter. She asked him to specify the options for denuclearization that he discussed with Kim Jong Un. And he was unable to do so, because he doesn't have a clue. https://t.co/dccYb9vuIk
— Stephen Schwartz (@AtomicAnalyst) March 1, 2019
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