Trump talks yield little action
Having all but exploded the painstaking multilateral agreement keeping an Iranian bomb at bay, President Trump said this week that he would meet with the Islamic Republic’s leaders without preconditions “any time they want to.” He added, in as close an approximation of The Donald Doctrine as we’re likely to get, “I’ll meet with anybody. ... I believe in meeting.”
The president approached his recent summits with two other dangerous U.S. adversaries, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, with much the same nonchalance. And he has a point about the value of talking to our enemies. But his supreme confidence in his ability to achieve something beyond talk, particularly without the preparation or care typically applied to such highstakes diplomacy, has not been borne out.
There is evidence that North Korea, for instance, is building more intercontinental ballistic missiles, according to U.S. intelligence findings reported by the Washington Post this week. The revelation came soon after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Kim’s regime continues to enrich fissile material for nuclear weapons.
Granted, the Democratic People’s Republic has made modest concessions since the Trump-Kim summit, repatriating what are said to be remains of U.S. war dead and moving to dismantle a missile engine test site. And few expected the regime to proceed quickly or decisively to cease nuclear arms development, especially given that the Singapore meeting in June produced only a vague promise to “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” But the recent reports nevertheless belie Trump’s claim that “there is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea.”
Nor does Russia’s cyberwar footing appear to have abated since Trump’s obsequious performance alongside Putin in Finland last month. Facebook announced Tuesday that it was removing 32 fake accounts and pages aiming to influence the coming elections using tactics similar to those associated with Russia in 2016. Earlier, a Microsoft executive revealed Russian attempts to hack three 2018 congressional campaigns, and Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, one of the Senate’s most vulnerable Democrats, confirmed such an attack on her re-election effort.
Again, no one should have expected a friendly meeting with the president to alter the Russian strongman’s determination to sabotage U.S. and other Western democracies. But that’s the point: Merely pantomiming improved relations with the likes of Putin and Kim does little to curb their hostile activities.
Similarly, even if Iranian President Hassan Rouhani hadn’t dismissed Trump’s offer to meet “any time,” one more such summit would be a long way from the diplomatic achievement the administration undermined by withdrawing from an accord that actually and verifiably suspended Tehran’s nuclear weapons program.
Pompeo explained this week that “the president wants to meet with folks to solve problems.” Trump certainly has proposed and participated in plenty of meetings, but his enthusiasm for diplomatic theater has yet to solve any substantial problems.