WILL HE MAKE A MOCKERY OF SNEERING CRITICS — JUST LIKE REAGAN?
Once again, the experts are united: Trump is a fool; the north Korea summit was a farce; this one-on-one approach doesn’t work, they scoff. Didn’t America’s greatest diplomat, Henry Kissinger, once say that he only let president Richard nixon in the negotiating room with the Vietnamese in the early Seventies when all the hard work had been done and the peace deal was a formality?
But here’s The Donald just showing up and telling the leader of the world’s most repressive regime that he has some nice beaches in his country and could build some great hotels. And that’s it: war over. Seriously? The giddy madness of the Singapore summit and the absence of concrete results feel — as Kim Jong-un himself said — like fiction. That is reason enough to be sceptical about how much has actually been achieved. Reason, too, for queasiness when the leader of the free world shows a torturer from an impoverished nation such respect.
To describe Kim Jong-un as a ‘talented young man’ who ‘loves his country’ is jaw-dropping to anyone who has even the slightest acquaintance with the truth of life in north Korea.
But here’s the thing: nothing else has worked in the past. And this just might.
Perhaps there is method in Donald Trump’s madness. Or perhaps it’s better understood the other way round: there is madness in his method, and the madness is what counts.
I saw Barack Obama’s diplomacy up close when I was based in Washington for the BBc and followed him around the world. I remember being in Prague when Obama — then at the height of his fame and power — declared that his aim was a world free of nuclear weapons.
How all his groupies swooned. How richly he deserved that nobel Peace Prize! And then, that very night, the north Koreans tested a ballistic missile.
PRESIDENT Obama and his team held an emergency meeting and decided to act. They inserted some words into his next speech warning Kim Jong-un that he risked being isolated. That was it. It was measured, it was the result of much thought, and it got America nowhere.
Trump’s approach simply could not be more different.
It started, of course, with a display of belligerence that terrified many. The threats against Pyongyang; the talk of nuclear war — of unspeakable horror — as if it were a real possibility. Donald Trump was going to blow up the world!
But wait. The same fears were expressed about Ronald Reagan when he was in the White House. Before he was elected, there was a real effort to persuade Americans he was a danger.
Those liberal arguments became even shriller when he began to talk of the Soviet Union being ‘an evil empire’. They reached fever pitch in 1984 after a soundcheck for a broadcast, during which he jokingly said: ‘My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia for ever. We begin bombing in five minutes.’
For those who accuse Donald Trump of being uniquely aggressive, it’s worth remembering Ronnie, and remembering what came after his initial belligerence: a meeting of minds with the Soviet leader Gorbachev.
There were summits with walks in the woods, jokes and japes and meals, and a relationship that led in the end to the cold War dying away. And the threat of nuclear war reducing — not increasing — on Ronnie’s watch.
Is Trump the new Reagan? The answer is no, I think, although Trump may have stolen some of Reagan’s early tactics. But Reagan was an ideologically driven man. He had a strong sense of right and wrong. He had a vision for America and for the world.
Trump does not have that. But far from being a weakness, it may be a strength in terms of the ability to get things done.
Trump has a businessman’s sense of what is possible, and the single-minded determination of a chief executive to get the deal he wants and needs, irrespective of whether that deal is ideologically pure, or diplomatically savvy.
It’s just a deal. If it makes sense for Trump and it makes sense for the other guy — even if he’s a despot — Trump will sign. And the north Koreans know this.
Former Downing Street chief of staff Jonathan Powell — who now works full-time as a mediator in the world’s hot-spots — has been in north Korea recently and was impressed by the reading matter of the officials he met.
They had started on The Art Of The Deal (the book Trump cowrote, in which he claimed to be a tough negotiator) and moved on to Fire And Fury, a none-too-flattering account of the chaos behind the scenes in the Trump White House. But what Fire And Fury tells you is that Trump operates on his own and with personal motives.
never mind if you murder and torture your own people. never mind if you threaten neighbours such as Japan (including firing a rocket right over it last year), or might in the future renege on this whole arrangement. Trump wants short-term victories with big splashes of publicity.
The north Koreans know that — according to Jonathan Powell — and have come up with the goods.
The other thing a businessman brings to the table is the willingness to compromise. Diplomats do that too, of course, but not to this extent. Diplomats deal with wider political alliances; they observe niceties with Ferrero Rocher smoothness.
Business folk don’t do deals to save the world. They do deals to further their interests and those of their shareholders. And Trump is all business all the time. He is willing to do or say whatever it takes.
All of which leads us to a certain irony. Having made his bombastic threats and walked away from this summit in the first instance, you could argue that Donald Trump is coming away with a deal that isn’t all that great for America. In fact, it looks to a lot of Korea watchers like a very good deal for Kim Jong-un. It has propelled him into the limelight and could well see sanctions against him being hugely reduced very soon, in return for not very much.
Again, many experts are raising their eyebrows and wondering at the blundering of the U.S. leader.
But they underestimate him at their peril. Trump wants a deal that reduces the risk to America from north Korea and, crucially, allows him to claim a diplomatic victory. He’s succeeded in both those goals.
Perhaps getting rid of the nukes was (and is) too big a task now without a war being fought, but maybe Trump understands that and accepts it with a shrug.
Of course, whatever happened this week, liberals would still have condemned the president as a bombastic knucklehead.
AFEW days ago, at the Tony awards for Broadway shows, the once mighty American luvvie establishment met and pronounced sentence. ‘F*** Trump,’ yelled Robert Deniro from the stage, for which he received a standing ovation.
Poor saps. They play endlessly into his hands. Hating Donald Trump, and everything he says or does, might work at a Hollywood screening or a fancy Manhattan restaurant, but out there in the rest of America, how does it play?
Well, Donald Trump is currently experiencing his biggest rise in popularity since he was elected. He put on a show fancier than any Broadway production in Singapore with his domestic politics at the very front of his mind.
Whether he is quite the negotiator he claims to be I am not sure, but when it comes to a showman’s touch, and the ability to convince large numbers of people he is getting things done, he has no equal.
Poor Robert Deniro is left shouting obscenities while Donald gets the job done. That’s how Singapore will look to many Americans, and plenty of others around the world.
Ask a simple question: if you live on America’s west coast, potentially within range of north Korean nuclear missiles, do you feel safer when you see Kim and Trump shaking hands and grinning?
Donald Trump may not know much, but he knows the answer to that question. The know-it-alls can scoff and sneer, as know-it-alls do. But for the time being, Trump is winning.