No groundbreaking summit, but that’s OK
Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un didn’t agree on anything of global importance, and the grandiose photo opportunity that took place in Singapore probably benefited Kim more than it did Trump. But the beauty of the moment is that Trump doesn’t care about that sort of thing, and that could be good for world peace.
Consistency isn’t generally one of Trump’s strengths. Even at his Singapore press conference yesterday, he first said North Koreans’ human rights had been discussed only briefly at the summit and then contradicted himself, saying the discussion had taken place “at great length.” But Trump has been consistent about one thing: A meeting with anyone is “no big deal.” It’s not a royal honor to bestow and not a human rights prize to award. It doesn’t cost much even when the U.S. president is involved. It’s just a meeting.
Trump had no compunction about setting up a row of alternating U.S. and North Korean flags as the backdrop for the photo op or about shaking Kim’s hand. The optics pointed to a meeting of equals, which is preposterous on any number of levels. To Trump, though, Kim appears to be a fellow celebrity, a “very talented person” and a “good negotiator.”
Trump reduces all the moral issues that exist in global politics to the ethos of a celebrity gathering, where people know inconvenient truths about each other but still smile, shake hands and chat. They may have said nasty things about each other in public, but in private, they are on first-name terms, if not necessarily chummy.
This may feel wrong, especially after eight years of Barack Obama’s attempts at moral leadership — which, it must be said, didn’t help resolve a single major global issue. But it’s not necessarily a bad mode of operation. When leaders know each other, relatively minor concessions, important nonetheless to a lot of ordinary people, such as the repatriation of the bodies of U.S. Korean war dead or the return of the Japanese abductees, are easier to achieve. The return of the U.S. soldiers’ bodies is one of the few specific items on which Trump and Kim signed off.
The “very special bond” Trump said he had developed with Kim may turn out to be junk. The declaration the two leaders signed is mostly a commitment to further negotiations, and it can easily lead to nothing, as many times in the past. But a personal breaking of the ice is worth something, and a permanent channel of communication isn’t worthless, either. A stop to U.S.-led military exercises on the Korean peninsula and a moratorium on further North Korean nuclear testing — earlier proposed by China — are small but useful steps toward peace, even if China will probably make sure now that international sanctions don’t hurt the Kim regime too much.
The U.S. president is taking a gamble with his amoral, transactional approach, and he will be derided and despised if he fails. On the other hand, he already faces so much derision, contempt and hatred that he doesn’t stand to lose much. And he’d look even more incongruous attempting the moral leadership spiel. Trump shouldn’t be condemned merely for trying a different tack, and he should be commended if any results are achieved — even if all he manages to do is bring the dead soldiers home.