Hold the irrational exuberance on Kim

The historic handshake between the leaders of North and South Korea has, for now, reduced the threat of war on the Korean Peninsula. Kim Jong Un even stepped across the line between the Koreas, becoming the first North Korean dictator to set foot in the South, even if only for a moment.

While these are welcome developments, they don’t justify the amount of, shall we say, irrational exuberance they’re producing. President Trump’s supporters are already talking about a Nobel Peace Prize.

It is difficult to know why Kim is, literally, putting his best foot forward. A more judicious inventory of the nuclear negotiations suggests multiple reasons for caution:

❚ North Korea has already achieved major diplomatic and strategic victories over the past year, while giving up exactly nothing. Pyongyang has tested nuclear weapons and long-range missiles at will. Months of heated threats from Washington were answered with equally muscular rhetoric. Kim stood fast: Today, the threats are over, but the arsenal remains.

In the wake of Trump’s empty fulminations, Kim seized the opportunity to look reasonable by comparison. Consequently, a leader who just a few years ago was an international pariah — a man, we might recall, who murdered his own half-brother in a chemical attack in an international airport — is being lauded as a diplomat.

❚ The Americans are doing all of this backward — deciding first to have a summit, and then trying to figure out why. Holding a summit without a firm agenda is always courting disaster. The North Koreans have nothing to lose here; a summit will buy them time for their nuclear program and make it harder for the West to stay united on sanctions. In the meantime, Kim is making offers that he will likely never honor.

❚ These negotiations seem to have some serious opponents in the administration, starting with national security adviser John Bolton. Bolton has cagily suggested that the deal to denuclearize Libya could serve as a template for a Korea deal. Bolton, of course, knows that the North Koreans pointed to Moammar Gadhafi’s abdication of his nuclear program as the reason the West toppled him. When Bolton equated a Korean deal with Libya, he might as well have warned Kim directly that regime change is in the cards.

It is possible, and we must hope, that North Korea’s leader has decided his state is unsustainable.

Even so, we should have no illusions about the price we have already paid to get this far, and prepare for the dangers that lie ahead if we find — as still seems likely — that we are being duped.