Trump retreats from moral stand

WASHINGTON — Beaming in the moments after his summit with Kim Jong Un, President Donald Trump was asked about North Korea’s history of human rights horrors. “It’s rough,” he allowed. Then he added, “It’s rough in a lot of places, by the way. Not just there.”

Trump’s verbal shrug in Singapore represented a striking change from the way U.S. presidents have viewed their job, a shift from the nation’s asserted stance as the globe’s moral leader in favour of an approach based more on trade-offs with adversaries and allies alike.

Trump, who quickly left for the long journey home after his whirlwind summit with Kim, made clear that his main interest — almost his sole interest — was taking a first step toward denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula. There was no lecturing of Kim over how to treat his own people in a nation that is estimated to have between 80,000 and 120,000 political prisoners and remains one of the world’s most closed and oppressive societies.

Though Trump is far from the first U.S. president to work with an unsavoury counterpart to achieve a strategic goal, his decision to broadcast that he tacitly accepts Kim’s history of atrocities was a sharp break from the position of presidents from both parties to set America as the exemplar shining city on a hill for other nations to emulate.