Just first baby steps
CRITICS LINE UP: ‘WE EXPECTED A FLOP, BUT IT’S FLOPPIER THAN EXPECTED’
Among the Korea-watching crowd, the verdict appears largely negative.
It actually happened. President Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un met in Singapore on Monday evening, marking the first time a sitting US leader has met face-toface with a member of the dynasty that rules North Korea.
Though their meeting was brief and their commitments vague, there’s no doubting history was made.
Will the Trump-Kim summit come to be seen as the dawn of a new, positive era in relations between North Korea and the US? Or is this just another blip along the road from a president whose crude foreign policy ethos – assuming he has one – was recently summed up by a White House official as: “We’re America, bitch”?
For now, it seems to be a Rorschach test, splitting opinions about its significance and impact.
Among the Korea-watching crowd, the verdict appears largely negative.
Andrei Lankov, a professor at Kookmin University in Seoul and a respected expert on North Korea, offered one of the harshest takes: “We expected it would be a flop, but it’s floppier than anything we expected. The [post-summit] declaration is pretty much meaningless.”
There were glimmers of a more hopeful attitude.
Victor Cha, the Georgetown professor who a few months ago lost a potential Trump administration job over the threat of military force against North Korea, offered a kind of grim optimism in the New York Times. “In the case of North Korea, there are never good policy options – only choices between the bad and the worse.”
Writing in the New Yorker, E Tammy Kim said although Trump was unpopular among South Koreans, the drive for peace was widely supported.
Of course, Trump’s announcement that he will halt US-South Korea military exercises and his desire to get US troops out of South Korea will cause anxiety among conservatives. Hardliners have responded angrily, even questioning the nature of the USSouth Korea alliance.
But Trump’s announcement may not deter liberals such as South Korean president Moon Jae-in, who has generally taken a more ambiguous view of the alliance.
Nor will the prospect of changes to the US presence in South Korea upset China and Russia, who have long pushed for a “freeze-forfreeze” deal that would see North Korea stop weapons testing in exchange for a halt to US-South Korea military exercises. Things can change, of course. Trump has proven himself unpredictable and there are indica- tions that some things he said may have been inaccurate.
North Korea’s record on keeping to its word is pretty shaky, too.
Moreover, the statement was brief, full of recycled ideas and vague promises. Views of it diverge, in large part, because it is just ink on a paper, lacking in any real practical specifics.
History was made in Singapore, but it’s a rough draft. We’ll have to fill in the details and work out the ending later. – Washington Post