Ian O’Doherty

Could Trump’s ‘madman doctrine’ lead to historic summit in Ireland?

SOME said it couldn’t be done. Others said it shouldn’t. Most people simply thought it would never be done. When North Korea announced it wanted to sit down and talk to Donald Trump, the world sat up and took notice.

The famously opaque hermit state has long been a mystery even to their only benefactor, China.

While officials from North Korea’s massive neighbour to the north had often bemoaned the unpredictability of leader Kim Jong-un, last Thursday’s announcement he wanted to have face-to-face talks with the US president was the biggest piece of rapprochement since the 1953 armistice brought a halt to the bloody, three-year Korean War.

Often naïvely portrayed as a cartoonish buffoon, Kim leads the most despotic regime in the world.

The only country in the world which sends three generations of the same family to concentration camps for the perceived infractions of just one family member, even a cursory read through the books written by defectors paints a picture that owes more to Hieronymus Bosch than a modern society.

From state-organised famines, mass executions and slavery to the torture and kidnapping of foreign nationals, no other country has destabilised a region with quite the same stubborn belligerence as the Kim family and their evil dynasty.

So when Trump the candidate kept up his bellicose rhetoric against Kim when he became Donald Trump the president, onlookers were horrified. Having seen Obama pursue an eight-year policy of containment, maintained through ineffective sanctions and the occasional letter of denunciation, nobody – least of all the North Koreans or their Chinese sponsors – expected the new US leader to threaten “fire and fury” against the diminutive despot.

This was dismissed as the “madman doctrine” by some of Trump’s critics and they argued that prodding and needling Kim would only provoke a dangerous response. But perhaps those critics were right for the wrong reasons.

Because it has paid dividends beyond anything his predecessors had ever even hoped to achieve.

When the North Koreans launched a missile test unnervingly close to Japanese territorial waters, Trump’s response was to deploy another aircraft carrier to the region, bolstered by stealth bombers and a promise to leave Pyongyang with a “bloody nose” if the sabre rattling continued.

This is another reminder that Trump is to regular diplomacy what a bull is to a china shop, but against all the odds, it has worked.

Here in the West when we sneer at the obvious absurdities of Kim’s regime, we tend to forget that for them the Korean War is still ongoing.

The armistice, after all, brokered only an uneasy ceasefire, not a formal cessation of hostilities.

To listen to some of the Trump critics, who have become so deranged since his election they would probably hold their breath if he said oxygen was good for you, this is a massive misstep by his administration.

Yet their claims that Trump’s approach would lead to another war have been proved wrong.

In fact, there is no doubt that if this had happened under Barack Obama’s watch, there would now be loud calls for him to be given a second Nobel Peace prize.

As it is, if this meeting does lead to the total de-nuclearisation of the region, will we see a similar clamour for Trump to be honoured?

In years to come, historians may well look back and cite the Otto Warmbier scandal as the moment when everything changed between the two countries.

Warmbier, you may recall, was arrested by North Korean police while on a student trip to Pyongyang and when he was finally returned to his parents just before he died, he was in a vegetative state as a result of torture.

Trump’s decision to send his father as part of the US delegation

to the recent Winter Olympics was a sign the Americans weren’t prepared to forgive and certainly weren’t prepared to forget.

Presumably because Kim has realised he is dealing with someone as unpredictable as him, but with a bigger button, they have decided caution is the better part of valour.

But where will the meeting be held, sometime before the end of May? Beijing and Geneva were the first two possible mooted locations but already dismissed by officials from either side.

Well, what about Ireland? An idea which initially seems hubristic, a pipe dream akin to hosting the Olympics.

But with Leo Varadkar meeting Trump this Thursday, would it not be better for him to offer the use of, say, Farmleigh for the talks rather than lecture the Potus on America’s gay rights record?

We even have some historical skin in this particular game. After all, it was Irishman Frank Aiken who spearheaded the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty nearly 50 years ago; a treaty specifically designed to stop the likes of North Korea getting the bomb.

More importantly than that, we are a neutral, non-nuclear, non-aligned country who can be trusted as an honest and – most importantly – non-threatening.

For many people of a certain generation the city of Reykjavik will forever be associated with the peace talks between Reagan and Gorbachev in 1986, widely credited with laying the foundations for the end of the Cold War.

If Dear is as interested in having a career as an international statesman as many suspect him to be, then surely Thursday is the perfect opportunity for him – and his country – to make a mark on the international stage.

So come on, Leo, the ball’s in your court.

Who knows, you might even get your own Nobel Prize out of it...