Don’t dismiss summit too quickly

A consensus seems to be emerging in much of Washington that President Donald Trump gave away too much and got too little in his summit meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore this week.

Yes, there was a lot of pomp and circumstance at this summit, and perhaps a bit too much fawning over the North Korean strongman. But if diplomacy is to have a chance, some effort to build camaraderie is sensible — especially after the volleys of insults between Trump and Kim in 2017 seemed to bring the world to the brink of war. Similarly, every American president of the past quarter of a century has paid more attention to North Korea’s nuclear programme than to the country’s abysmal humanrights record.

Trump made mistakes, of course. For example, he should not have called the US-South Korean joint military exercises that take place twice a year with well over 20,000 troops “provocative”. But they are indeed large and, yes, they are expensive. They are also replaceable.

It is true the international sanctions regime of “maximum pressure” is already gradually weakening. That is a regrettable, but almost inevitable, casualty of a promising diplomatic process.

Maintaining a hopeful view of the summit and of what it means for US-North Korean relations will be sustainable only if Pyongyang’s behaviour improves meaningfully and permanently.

The onus is therefore now squarely on Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, given his post-summit charge to undertake substantive negotiations. Only when we see whether North Korea will go along with a denuclearisation plan and begin its verifiable implementation will we really know how to evaluate what just happened in Singapore.