Molly Kiniry:
The Trump doctrine, insofar as it has definition, is, the sort of parenting strategy which argues for allowing a child to cry through the night
Some of the most evocative iconography in the pantheon of Americana is made up of our country’s prodigal sons coming home. A teenage girl, captured mid-leap from airport tarmac into her father’s arms after his return from six years in the Hanoi Hilton, remains one of the defining images of the Vietnam War. The more modern version, captured in a whole genre of YouTube videos dedicated to the subject, shows a soldier’s return from a long stint of deployment, greeted by spouse and children and dogs in a tangle of arms, legs and emotion. I’ve yet to find one that doesn’t make me cry.
It is part of our national ethos that nobody gets left behind. They could be soldiers in the jungles of Vietnam or US diplomats in Iran: while we do not pay bribes or negotiate with terrorists, we fight to get our people back.
The long, sometimes unbearable wait for their return can take a toll on whoever happens to be President at the time. Jimmy Carter was worn down to electoral defeat by the 1980 Iran hostage crisis, in which 52 American diplomats and citizens were held captive for 444 days in the US Embassy in Tehran. Although Carter wasn’t credited for their final release – which occurred literally minutes after his successor, Ronald Reagan, was sworn in – his refusal to surrender to the Ayatollah’s demands ultimately produced the desired results.
Likewise, the return this week of three American hostages released by North Korea – escorted back to the US by the secretary of state and greeted upon arrival by the President and First Lady – is a powerful example of successful diplomacy in the Trump era.
The homecoming of Kim Dongchul, Kim Hak-song and Tony Kim (all Korean Americans) is also a real vindication of Trump’s strategy when it comes to the United States’ longestrunning conflict.
In North Korea, we are not dealing with a banal or benevolent regime, but an open-air prison camp masquerading as a country – one whose leaders have overt nuclear ambitions and will prioritise their own well-being over that of everyone else on the Korean peninsula. Even Xi Jinping, arguably the world’s ultimate power broker, has failed to bring Kim Jong-un to heel.
The Kim regime realised several generations ago that the key to free food, fuel, and non-interference from the West, was to act up and wait for the United States, afraid of open confrontation with China, to step into the void.
And so America – until this point – duly played nanny, proffering billion-dollar pacifiers and resorting to open bribery with the same prayer of anyone who has ever dealt with an unruly child: please, dear God, let there be quiet again.
The Trump doctrine, insofar as it has definition, is, however, the sort of parenting strategy which argues for allowing a child to cry through the night. Trump and his base are disgusted with the notion that American taxpayers and soldiers should shoulder the burden of keeping the world safe from North Korea’s unpredictability. It is not a wholly unreasonable position. And the new strategy – of aggressive refusal to stick to the status quo – appears to be paying dividends.
Several bad actors in the international space – the North Koreans chief among them – seem to have realised that the safety net underpinning their barren bellicosity is now gone, and their behaviour has changed accordingly.
This is a welcome change. It is difficult to imagine that last month’s summit between the two Korean leaders, laughing together and stepping backwards and forwards across the official boundary line between North and South, could have happened in a world where the United States was still, in effect, propping up the political regime in the North by making sure that the pot never boiled over.
The same goes for next month’s summit in Singapore, where Trump and Kim Jong-un will meet for the first time. At the moment, it’s not clear what Trump’s end-goal is here, or what his strategy will look like; but it is increasingly clear that he is quite prepared to take a tough line, pressed on by more hawkish advisers.
These meetings might kick-start a nuclear disarmament process; the story may well end with peace in Korea and the largest de-mining operation in the history of world, after seventy years of carefully treading around a no-man’s land.
If it does, it will show that – when it comes to foreign policy – it might be better for America to step away from its role as the world’s nanny.