World can sleep more peacefully

It is difficult to assess the impact of yesterday’s historic summit between US President Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, leader of the reclusive and hard-core communist North Korea. But journalists are already describing the event as “era-defining”. It has been pointed out that other American presidents also reached out to their enemies across the gulf of ideology … and that these meetings produced fundamental global changes.

In 1972, Richard Nixon went to China with the aim of thawing the frosty relations between the two countries, which developed after the US broke off diplomatic relations with Beijing in the wake of the Communist takeover in 1949.

Nixon’s visit not only improved the feelings between the two countries, but helped nudge China into the 20th century. The result, China as a world economic powerhouse is plain for all to see.

In 1986, Ronald Reagan met Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Helsinki to discuss nuclear disarmament in the first major rapprochement between the two nuclear superpowers. Although those talks collapsed, they led to a major treaty the following year on eliminating certain nuclear missiles.

In 1987, Reagan stood in Berlin and pleaded with Gorbachev to “tear down this wall!” And less than two years later, down it came, followed by the collapse of the entire Soviet system.

What all these presidents have in common is that they are Republicans – the party often reviled by the leftist intelligentsia as being warmongers.

Trump is playing to the gallery, as do all politicians. And Kim has realised it is time he brought his country in from the cold of international isolation.

Whatever their motives, the two have ratcheted down the tension in Korea and tonight the world sleeps a little more peacefully.