Kim: From pariah to Mr. Personality
In Singapore on Tuesday, Donald Trump put on full display his ignorance, his propensity for self-adulation, and a demonstration that despite his endless self-praise about being a great deal-maker, he can’t negotiate his way out a paper bag. Of course I’m a proponent of diplomacy, and I’m sure we all agree with the timehonored, if musty sentiment often ascribed incorrectly to Winston Churchill, that “jaw-jaw is better than war-war.”
The line actually came from a 1958 comment by former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. So in that sense a summit was preferable to continued foolish saber rattling, I was pleased that Donald Trump was willing to sit down with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
But either through ignorance or egomania, Trump jumped into a face-to-face meeting with Kim with no preparation by him or by lower-level diplomats — other than a couple of seemingly fruitful meetings in advance by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Next, when Trump unveiled the socalled agreement, he excoriated past presidents for not making the issue a “priority” and hailed his own document as “very, very comprehensive.”
In fact, when President Bill Clinton struck a deal with North Korea in 1994, the hermit nation agreed to take a variety of specific steps that included freezing and later dismantling its nuclear program, as well as opening its facilities to international inspectors. That lasted nearly a decade before North Korea reneged And when President George W. Bush forged a deal in 2005, North Korea promised to abandon all of its nuclear weapons programs and return to the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons. That the lasted about four years. A deal with Obama of giving up their nukes for food lasted under a year.
As we know, North Korea went on to develop perhaps as many as 60 nuclear weapons and, it appears, missiles to deliver them. By comparison, the joint statement signed by Trump and Kim Jong Un reduces North Korea’s commitments to a single sentence: a pledge to “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”
“It is the most watered-down joint statement concerning these two nations ever,” said Sung-YoonLee, a North Korea expert at Tufts University. Probably because Barack Obama spent nearly two years working out an extraordinary deal with Iran, France, Germany, Russia, China, and United Kingdom that prevented Iran from developing nuclear weapons in the first place — an agreement that Trump, a magnificent dealbreaker as opposed to deal-maker destroyed unilaterally, Trump decided that in negotiations with North Korea, it was unnecessary to pursue months of low-level talks that might culminate in a landmark accord. Instead, Trump agreed to a face-to-face meeting before either side had even agreed on a broad definition of denuclearization.
As it turns out, what Mike Pompeo said that the least that the U. S. would agree to —“complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization — didn’t quite make it into the agreement. The words “verifiable” and “irreversible” are notable by their absence. And Trump, in an interview with Greta Van Susteren, gushes over Kim Jong Un, sounding much more like Neville Chamberlain, who had famously described Adolf Hitler as “a gentleman” after their meetings in Germany.: “Really,” Trump said of Kim, “he’s got a great personality. He’s a funny guy, he’s very smart; he’s a great negotiator. He loves his people, not that I’m surprised by that, but he loves his people.”
Again, it’s a safe bet that Trump was not “surprised by that” because he is wholly ignorant of the 2014 United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in North Korea that stated among many other things that “systematic, widespread, and gross human rights violations committed by the government including murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortion, and other sexual violence, and constituted crimes against humanity.” Kim loves his people all right. He loves ‘em to death.
At least we know, however, that Trump is fully capable of standing up to those bloodthirsty Canadians should they stream across the border set on attacking us with their hockey sticks.