National Post (National Edition)
What’s really behind Trump’s dictator praise
“North Korea, under the leadership of Kim Jong Un, will become a great Economic Powerhouse,” President Donald Trump tweeted last week, in advance of his denuclearization talks with Kim later this month. “He may surprise some but he won’t surprise me, because I have gotten to know him & fully understand how capable he is.”
Trump’s praise for the North Korean dictator — and hopes for a breakthrough in negotiating peace — won’t surprise his detractors, either. “Kim Jong Un has become yet another authoritarian ruler that Trump simply can’t resist praising,” scoffed Slate, one of many media outlets mocking Trump’s presumed naivete in foreign affairs and shallowness in judging character.
The shallowness, however, is all the media’s, whose blind hatred of Trump leads to a myopic analysis of his M.O. True, Trump has also lavished praise on China’s President Xi Jinping and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, both strongmen. But that hasn’t prevented him from being tougher on China and Russia than any president in recent history, as their leaders no doubt rue.
To bring China to heel, Trump sent its economy reeling by levying steep tariffs and threatening to follow up with steeper ones still. Militarily, he is confronting Chinese belligerence with resolve unseen in previous administrations — this week he sent two guided-missile destroyers past Chinese manmade islands in the South China Sea in defiance of Chinese claims — and is forcefully backing Japan, Taiwan and other Chinese adversaries. To constrain Russia, Trump is undermining its earnings from oil and gas exports — Russia’s chief source of revenue — by countering its export projects and flooding the world with oil and gas. Militarily, Trump has ended the INF (Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces) treaty with Russia and threatened to outspend Russia by far if it attempts to match the U.S. in an arms race.
Trump does not indiscriminately praise authoritarians. He has proffered no praise to Venezuela’s Maduro, Cuba’s Castro, the Iranian Mullahs or ISIL’S al-baghdadi because he is not negotiating with them. Neither is he irrational or erratic in his approach to foreign policy. Rather, Trump is relentlessly rational, focused on the deal he wants to strike, and on maximizing his chances of success.
Trump needs Putin and Xi to temper their ambitions for their countries and for themselves. Since they would never back down willingly, Trump uses Amer- ica’s superior economy and military to force their compliance. By simultaneously praising their prowess in well-representing the interests of their countries, he allows them to save face with their own people as their power recedes. Trump wants to win without forcing the other side to cry “uncle.”
In Trump’s high-stakes poker game with Kim, Trump called Kim’s over-the-top threats and raised them, finally forcing “Rocket Man” to fold. With Kim browbeat- en to the negotiating table and sanctioned to the hilt, Trump then proffered his praise, to save Kim’s face and strengthen his standing at home. Among Kim’s concessions to date are the return of three American hostages, the return after almost 70 years of the remains of American servicemen killed in the Korean War, and a cessation of missile testing. The threat of what seemed to be an inevitable war has faded, as has what was perhaps the most unsettling factor of all: Kim’s carefully cultivated image as bloodthirsty and unpredictable, a loose cannon who could at any moment launch nuclear war against the U.S. and South Korea.
Through Trump’s diplomacy, the temperature has been lowered and North Korea is now seen more as a rational actor. His next task is to craft a deal that somehow gives the Swisseducated Kim and his brutal regime a glide path to denuclearization and liberalization while guaranteeing their safety. North Korea’s leaders are undoubtedly determined to avoid the fate of Moammar Gadhafi, the Libyan leader who abandoned his nuclear program and became a de facto ally of the West, only to be betrayed by the West and left to suffer a brutal death.
In coercing Kim to abandon nuclear weaponr y, Trump will wield his sticks but also dangle carrots, including the prospect of North Korea as an economic power — a prospect that Trump may sincerely envisage, given South and North Korea’s common goal to reunify. Until the 1970s, North Korea, though communist, had a larger per capita GDP than capitalist South Korea, and although Communism has grievously stunted North Korea’s economy it maintains a large, educated and highly disciplined workforce. In the same way that Germany successfully reunified, a Korean reunification under capitalism would produce the economic powerhouse that Trump’s tweet anticipates.
Reunification is Korea’s destiny. To the extent it now seems plausible, for the first time in decades, it is materializing alongside praise for its dictator.
HE ALLOWS THEM TO SAVE FACE WITH THEIR OWN PEOPLE AS THEIR POWER RECEDES.