Trump, Kim soothe tensions, gain respect
Announcement of talks a bombshell amid all the chaos
After a year of insults and threats, the announcement that President Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un would meet to talk was said to bring a worldwide sigh of relief.
WASHINGTON – For President Trump and Kim Jong Un, the announcement of historic talks between the leaders of the United States and North Korea already has delivered something both of them crave: global attention and respect.
Foreign policy veterans more accustomed to blasting Trump as a naif and a nationalist who has eroded U.S. leadership found themselves praising him, albeit often with caveats. Leon Panetta, who served in top jobs in the Clinton and Obama administrations, said on CNN that the world was “breathing a sigh of relief.” Veteran diplomat Chris Hill, the chief U.S. negotiator in the last set of serious negotiations with Pyongyang, on MSNBC called the announcement “extraordinary.”
And Kim, a global outlaw, finally has won what he has long sought: the prestige of a face-to-face meeting with the U.S. president, without making the most consequential concessions that previous administrations demanded.
The episode is classic Trump, reflecting both his willingness to disrupt the accepted wisdom on how to proceed and his confidence in his own ability to strike a deal where others have failed. It also reflects his comfort with chaos, delivering a bombshell on foreign policy at a time he also is scrambling party orthodoxy on economic policy and facing a legal probe on Russian election meddling that seems to be accelerating.
At least for the moment, the diplomatic jolt overshadowed concerns about whether Trump had started a trade war when he imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum imports Thursday, not to mention the potential legal complications of $130,000 in hush money his lawyer paid a porn star.
For a president who delights in bombshells, it may have been the biggest bombshell of them all.
When President Obama met with President-elect Trump after his unexpected election victory in 2016, the outgoing president told the incoming one that North Korea would be the most urgent problem he would face, and the threat from Pyongyang’s nuclear program has only grown since then. Now North Korea has fired intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the U.S. mainland and tested what analysts believe was a hydrogen bomb.
Efforts to rein in the nuclear program have failed, despite attempts by a series of presidents. During the Clinton administration, in 1994, North Korea signed an agreement to freeze its plutonium weapons program in exchange for aid but secretly pursued uranium enrichment anyway. During the George W. Bush administration, in 2005, Pyongyang promised to dismantle its nuclear program, another vow it didn’t keep.
During his tenure, Trump has used more threatening rhetoric than any of his predecessors, vowing “fire and fury” against a North Korea threat. Now he also is the first to agree to sit down with the North Korean leader. In exchange, Kim promised to halt nuclear and missile testing and to tolerate the joint military drills in South Korea next month.
Some analysts expressed concern about whether the Trump administration was ready for the talks without the meticulous preparations that marked previous rounds of negotiations or an experienced diplomatic team in place. The top Korea expert resigned recently, and there is no U.S. ambassador in South Korea or confirmed assistant secretary of state for Asia.
Trump doesn’t seem concerned. “I won’t rule out direct talks with Kim Jong Un; I just won’t,” he said at the Gridiron Dinner last weekend. He even joked about which leader was more challenging. “As far as the risk of dealing with a madman is concerned,” he said, “that’s his problem, not mine.”