Dotard meets Rocket Man
Will Trump meet his match when he sits down with Kim ?
One is a septuagenarian American President, the other a millennial North Korean dictator. But each has nuclear weapons and mixes taunts and tributes to keep the other off balance. Thin-skinned alphas, both men are wedded to a go-it-alone leadership style, have a penchant for bombast and are determined to project dominance when they meet.
As President Donald Trump prepares for his summit in Singapore today with Kim Jong Un, he sees some of himself in the authoritarian North Korean: An unorthodox and sometimes feared figure who distrusts the established world order and has a thirst to make history.
Publicly, Trump has labelled Kim “Little Rocket Man” and in private with aides has called him “a crazy guy”. Kim, in turn, has called Trump a “mentally deranged US dotard”, a word suggesting senility.
Yet advisers say Trump considers Kim a rational actor, and the President has flattered the dictator recently with gratuitous praise. Trump is confident he can negotiate the terms of a deal such that each man can walk away, despite his maximalist demands, with what he wants: for Trump, a promise of peace and denuclearisation; for Kim, global legitimacy and prosperity.
“This a leader who really is an unknown personality,” Trump said of Kim on Sunday, as he departed Canada en route to Singapore. “People don’t know much about him. I think that he’s going to surprise on the upside, very much on the upside. We’ll see.”
Trump acknowledges that achieving an accord could take multiple meetings, but people who have discussed the issue with him said he views negotiating with Kim as if it were another of his real estate deals in New York.
The US President is banking on his forceful personality and what he sees as a singular ability to size up and manipulate competitors — never mind the obvious differences between property development and nuclear arms. For him, the technical details of arms negotiations are trivial relative to the chemistry he could forge with his North Korean counterpart and the possibility of breaking down a thick geopolitical barrier.
“It’s about attitude,” Trump said Friday. “It’s about willingness to get things done.” In Trump’s mind, tone and posture is so important that he predicted he would be able to determine Kim’s level of seriousness about abandoning North Korea’s nuclear weapons “within the first minute” of their meeting.
“My touch, my feel — that’s what I do,” Trump said on Sunday.
Victor D. Cha — a former George W. Bush Administration official who negotiated with North Korea and who was dropped as a potential South Korea ambassador by Trump — said the Singapore summit probably would shape domestic perceptions of both Trump and Kim.
Kim, he said, “constantly feels like he has to prove himself, and in that sense he’s going to do what no other North Korean leader has done, and that is command an audience with the President of the United States. And for Trump, this is the only diplomacy that he’s doing in the whole world right now. Everywhere else he’s either walking out of agreements or sanctioning countries . . . This is Trump’s only chance to make a mark as a statesman.”
The nuclear talks with North Korea are the ultimate test of Trump’s vision of foreign policy, which is that he can accomplish things that no other president could by virtue of his unique approach to personal diplomacy.
A motivating force for Trump is former President Barack Obama, who told Trump before his inauguration that North Korea was the greatest geopolitical challenge he would face in office. Aides said the fact that Obama recognised the gravity of the threat and could not extinguish it only heightened Trump’s interest in finding a way to persuade Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear programme.
“This is something that should have been solved by other presidents,” Trump said on Friday in the Rose Garden, appearing alongside Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. “I’m not just saying President Obama; I’m saying other presidents.”
For Kim — the inheritor of a communist dynasty that has been isolated from the world’s democracies for a half-century — protecting North Korea’s security is paramount, analysts say.
To that end, Kim and his lieutenants have been studying Trump closely for many months in preparation for their meeting, according to US analysts.
Of all the foreign leaders Trump has encountered in his year and a half in office, Kim has been the most difficult for him to read, according to the President’s advisers.
“He’s unpredictable in ways I think President Trump prides himself on being,” said a former senior Administration official, who requested anonymity to candidly discuss Trump’s approach to North Korea. “He’s unorthodox. In Kim, even Trump realises he may have met his match.”