KIM PLAYS HIS TRUMP CARD
Someone had an ace up his sleeve, but it wasn’t businessmanturned-president Trump
WHEN a dotard meets a rocket man just north of the Equator, expect something less than real. And be ready to swallow a bizarre mixture of fact and fantasy.
Now if you read for an English degree anywhere in the world during the 1970s, you will read the Trump-Kim summit like you would Luigi Pirandello’s Henry IV.
The parallel is this: Henry IV becomes insane after falling off his horse while playing the part of Henry IV, and for 12 years he lives the life of King Henry IV of 12th century Germany not realising he is not one.
It is now more than 500 days Trump has been president, and he still thinks he is the world’s No. 1 negotiator.
Did Kim get trumpled? Or Trump get jonged? Or are we watching Henry IV play out on a Singapore stage. Hard to tell? It is part of a surreal story.
Let’s read into the location where this summit was staged (pardon the playacting connotation) for clues. Singaporeans’ attention to detail is like no others. Punishingly punctilious may be the best way to wordsmith it. They do things on purpose. Purpose-built roads, purpose-built vehicles and purpose-built homes. They almost had purpose-built humans, but thank God designer genes were just a dream of one man. Otherwise, we would have had a purpose-built man chasing a purpose-built woman to have a purpose-built baby.
So, it is no surprise that this punishingly punctilious neighbour of ours chose the Capella hotel on Sentosa island. Capella is the brightest star in the constellation of Auriga and one of the brightest in the northern celestial hemisphere. Talk about harbouring hope. And Sentosa island is no Singapore surprise either. Peace island. Good metaphor, but sadly it may just remain a metaphor.
Why so? Well, if you had listened to Trump’s post-summit press conference you would have caught a Freudian slip. Without being asked, the American president said that there is just the possibility that this whole summit may be an abject failure. Trump watchers will say that he wants it to fail so that he can send in his forces to make a regime change. John Bolton is just waiting to be told to rain Trump’s fire and fury on Pyongyang. And on Iran, too. You see, old habits of regime changers die hard.
Trump is an “unsigning” president. From Paris Agreement through Trans-Pacific Partnership to the Iran nuclear agreement, Trump has unsigned them all. Malaysian Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad put it nicely, though in his vintage pedestrian way: I do not know how to work with a president who changes his mind overnight.
Ask the Iranians all about American promises. They will write you a long epistle on promises broken by one American after another that if the Persian Gulf was ink, it won’t be enough to cover the tale of Persian pain. And if that is not enough, look at what the Americans did to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. They first struck a deal with him, then they struck him.
And our rocket man knows it. Kim is too wily for this “Now, you are fired!” game.
Imagine a young man of a country with next to nothing to boast dragging a 71-year-old president of the most powerful nation in the world to a neutral location to talk about nuclear disarmament. It is Mr Fickle vs Mr Wily. Kim the mentor meets Trump the “Apprentice” live from Singapore. Trump, may have Airforce One and Kim only a seat in a plane borrowed from China Air but this man with a funny hairdo somehow appears to have forced Trump’s hand.
Just after the signing, Trump boasted to the Guardian of the United Kindgom that he had inked a “very comprehensive” agreement that would “take care of a very big and very dangerous problem for the world”. But what exactly did Trump sign? This is the question that the 3,000 journalists who covered the historic event are asking. There are no verifiable details to say that there is a roadmap to dismantle anything. All it says is that the two countries will establish new bilateral relations and work towards complete denuclearisation. If there ever was a document full of motherhood statements, this must be it.
And so has Kim jonged Trump? Yes, and punishingly, too. And of all places in the land of the punishingly punctilious people.
But what exactly did Trump sign? This is the question that the 3,000 journalists who covered the historic event are asking. There are no verifiable details to say that there is a roadmap to dismantle anything.