‘LOVE’ NOT WAR
Don touts Kim link, but summit doubts swirl
HANOI — His intelligence chiefs warn that North Korea is unlikely to surrender its nuclear weapons. His advisers fret that a breakthrough could prove elusive and that he might make an impulsive concession to score headlines. And his allies around the world worry he could get easily outmaneuvered.
Yet, President Trump is steadfast in his determination to meet face-to-face here this week with Kim Jong Un, aides say, because he has an unwavering faith in the power of the pen-pal relationship he has cultivated with the North Korean leader not only to bend the course of history, but to shape his own legacy.
“We have had such a great relationship,” Trump said Friday. “If I were not elected President, you would have been in a war with North Korea.”
The two men will enter their second summit together on Wednesday as unorthodox leaders who are both distrustful of the global establishment, eager to project dominance and determined to maximize their power.
They are worlds apart — Trump is a septuagenarian mogul who fancies himself capitalism’s golden progeny; Kim is a millennial strongman whose ruthless rule leaves his citizens impoverished and his adversaries off-balance.
But since their historic first meeting in Singapore last June, the two leaders have each adopted a strategy of playing to the other’s ego with gushing and gratuitous adoration in pursuit of their aims: For Trump, North Korea’s denuclearization; for Kim, its economic revival and respect on the world stage.
Trump gloats about the half dozen or so letters Kim has written him as if he were a smitten teenager in possession of valentines from a crush. White House officials refer to the diplomatic correspondence jokingly as “love letters.”
Kim addresses Trump as “Your Excellency” and employs flowery language to describe the President’s energy and political smarts, according to people who have read them. Trump has shown the documents to dozens of Oval Office visitors and bragged about them in public.
“He wrote me beautiful letters — and they’re great letters,” Trump said in September at a rally in West Virginia. “We fell in love.”
Trump has responded to Kim with his own enthusiastic notes, raving about how much he enjoys his company and vowing to make history together, according to White House officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Although they credit Trump with forging a warmer rapport with the North Korean leadership than any other American President, experts in U.S.-North Korea relations are skeptical that the relationship will result in denuclearization or peace.
“Personal chemistry between leaders is clearly important,” said Victor Cha, the top North Korea adviser in the George W. Bush administration.
But, he added, “Is that personal relationship enough to create success in the policy? We are so far apart that the notion that the friendship alone would create a North Korean decision to give up all of their nuclear weapons is very hard to imagine.”
Absent from Trump’s messaging on North Korea over the past year has been any mention of human rights. The savagery of Kim and his government has been well documented and was once a rallying cry for Trump.
But over the past year, Trump has said little publicly about Kim’s barbarism, and officials said that in private the President has told confidants that he considers human rights in North Korea largely inconsequential to striking a denuclearization deal.
Administration officials over the weekend played down the notion of any final breakthrough in this week’s negotiations.
Secretary of State Pompeo called denuclearization “a long and difficult task” in an interview on NBC’s “Today.”