Method behind Kim’s nuke threat madness

Deal to be Don with despot

THERE are so many couples nowadays who don’t understand one another – Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, David Davis and Michel Barnier, Coleen and Wayne Rooney.

The Rooneys are unlikely to threaten world peace or the global economy so we can safely leave them to it. North Korea and Brexit are different matters.

There is utter incomprehension on the faces of the EU’s chief negotiator and the Brexit Secretary whenever they meet. For God’s sake, guys, get over yourselves.

Relationship counsellors have worse nightmares at the thought of the US president and North Korea’s supreme leader as clients.

Annihilate

Trump says Kim is mad and gagging for it – nuclear war that is. And that kind of misunderstanding could lead to one.

But what if Kim is playing a more rational strategic game? His dad Kim Jong-il did in 1994.

The North Koreans needed oil and power stations and president Bill Clinton agreed to provide them in return for freezing their nuclear programme. But America couldn’t keep its side of the bargain.

To make progress – whether in Brussels or Pyongyang – we must try to see ourselves as others do, and put ourselves in their shoes. Kim believes the West wants to annihilate North Korea.

He might be deluded but after what happened to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi there are recent precedents.

And if they’d had the weapons Kim is perfecting they would still be alive and in power. That’s the view of former Foreign Secretary William Hague anyway, and he sees this with more clarity than current one, Boris Johnson.

Hague wrote: “To have a nuclear warhead and missile programme half complete means being vulnerable and under pressure. To have it ready for action gives power and security.”

If Hague is right then there is a deal to be done. After the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis Washington gave an assurance it would not seek the overthrow of Fidel Castro’s regime.

North Korea might settle for that, along with some oil, and the relaxing of sanctions. Surely it’s worth exploratory talks.

And Trump and Kim at least have something in common. They both go to lousy hairdressers.