Trump’s Korean gambit

What the brutal totalitarian Kim Jong Un and North Korea will get out of a face-to-face meeting with the President of the United States is fairly clear. Systematically ostracized from the world community, Kim will feel the validation of sitting across the table as equals with the world’s most powerful leader. For decades now, North Korean leaders — Kim’s father and grandfather — have sought to meet directly with U.S. Presidents in search of this precise elevation.

Kim will get the chance to ease increasingly punishing sanctions that President Trump has led the world to impose on the rogue government.

Kim will get more time to continue developing nuclear weapons behind a shroud of secrecy — though he has promised, for now, to cease tests and stop his missile launches.

And the North will clearly push to get what it has wanted since the 1950s: removal of U.S. troops from the peninsula. Trump cannot sell out our vulnerable South Korean allies.

What Trump and the United States are likely to get out of the meeting is far more dubious. Swinging for the fences and missing carries consequences far more serious than losing a ball game.

If, despite surprising his own administration with the announcement, despite laying no groundwork for talks, despite having eviscerated the State Department’s diplomatic expertise on North Korea, the President manages to negotiate nimbly with this inherently unreliable dictator, Trump could win a historic denuclearization of one of the world’s most dangerous regimes.

Or Trump, whom the American people have twice now witnessed being incoherent in domestic negotiations on immigration and gun control, could wrest some purported concession that melts away as the slippery and paranoid Kim, who sees nuclear weapons as vital to his preservation in power, reverts to business as usual.

Or Trump could wind up giving away something he doesn’t fully understand in a grand, supposedly artful deal.

Or Trump might meet with Kim, get nowhere, and leave with only bibimbap egg on his and our collective face.

It was in at least vague awareness of the lopsided cost-benefit analysis, last October, Trump — who back then had taken to mocking Kim as “Little Rocket Man” — ridiculed the prospect of negotiating with North Korea.

“Presidents and their administrations have been talking to North Korea for 25 years, agreements made and massive amounts of money paid,” he tweeted, continuing: “hasn’t worked, agreements violated before the ink was dry, makings fools of U.S. negotiators. Sorry, but only one thing will work!”

America and the world are at the whim of a make-it-up-as-he-goes-along President, again. God help him, and us.