Can Trump, Kim forge a real bond?
On his first visit to the White House after winning last November’s election, Donald Trump was informed by Barack Obama that his biggest initial headache as President would be North Korea.
Trump looked uncomprehending at the time, or perhaps he was just programmed to be sceptical about anything Obama told him. And truth be told, he’s had plenty of headaches in the 100-plus days since his inauguration, not least the realisation that wielding presidential power is a whole lot trickier than pretending to control a real-estate empire.
But North Korea has lately indeed been at the helm of recent concerns, and some observers even see the Tomahawk missile strikes in Syria and the deployment in Afghanistan of the biggest conventional bomb in the American arsenal as warnings to Pyongyang.
The dispatch of an aircraft carrier group to the region and the setting up in South Korea of the THAAD anti-missile system have inevitably exacerbated fears of renewed hostilities on the Korean Peninsula, where the 1953 armistice — following a devastating conflict that threatened to evolve into a third world war, with the US seriously toying with the idea of repeating the Hiroshima-Nagasaki experiment — never evolved into a peace agreement.
The habitual Washington mantra is that all options are on the table, and it has been reported that the US has contemplated the idea of knocking out a North Korean missile during a test. But, as the Americans acknowledge, there’s no knowing exactly how Kim Jongun might react to such a provocation. He would, in fact, have only two options: either to pretend it never happened, or to retaliate.
What form that retaliation might take is, again, uncharted territory. Missiles with some kind of a nuclear warhead could be lobbed in the direction of South Korea or Japan, the primary US allies within reach of North Korean ordnance. Could Kim’s rockets reach Australia? It’s unlikely, but no one’s quite sure, and the government in Canberra has lately been busy finding a slot in the posterior of the Trump administration.
One of the rewards is the first meeting on May 4 between Trump and Australia’s beleaguered Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull — aboard a warship off New York, which may have some symbolic significance. Pyongyang has been scathing towards Australian foreign minister Julie Bishop’s kowtowing to Uncle Sam during US vice-president Mike Pence’s recent tour of the region. Notwithstanding a degree of trepidation in Australia over the prospect of a conflict, though, there has been no spurt in demand for nuclear bunkers.
Australia has lately been more torn than before over its essential trading partnership with China on the one hand, and its traditional racial and ideological affinity with the US, which led it to obligatorily participate not just in the Korean and Vietnam wars but also in the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Trump’s unexpected bromance with China’s President Xi Jinping may have come as a pleasant surprise to Australia after all the flak that Beijing attracted from the Republican nominee during the American presidential campaign, including the charge that it was raping America, but it’s likely to be somewhat disconcerted by persistent indications that the US leader at least grudgingly admires his North Korean counterpart.
Just a few days after declaring that his nation would tackle North Korea on its own if China proved unhelpful, Trump described Kim Jong-un as a “smart cookie” who had at a tender age outsmarted potential rivals in the Pyongyang hierarchy (he executed an uncle in 2013, and is believed earlier this year to have pronounced the death sentence on an estranged halfbrother, among other purges) and, in the words of White House spokesman Sean Spicer, led his country forward.
In a Bloomberg interview on Monday, Trump went further, saying he would be “honoured” to meet Kim in the right circumstances. Somewhat surprisingly, this is not inconsistent with his campaign rhetoric, in which he suggested he would be happy to have a chat with Kim if he came over, even though he might feel obliged to treat his guest to a hamburger at the conference table rather than a state dinner.
What often gets left out of the media discourse is the crisis in South Korea, whose recently impeached and dethroned President Park Geun-hye, the daughter of a notorious military dictator, faces life imprisonment on corruption charges, with next Monday’s presidential election expected to favour the relatively progressive Moon Jae-in, who is ambivalent about THAAD and prefers the idea of engagement with the estranged North.
Trump and Kim, meanwhile, have at least one thing in common: the appearance of overgrown, frequently petulant, infants. The prospect of their bonding in a potential Mar-a-Lago playgroup may well be the best bet for continued peace on the Korean Peninsula.