Nixon went to China. Reagan went to Russia. And now Trump’s going to North Korea (or at least he’ll be meeting with it’s nutty leader, Kim Jong Un.) Is this a good thing? Or bad? Overall, I think it’s good, but with a whole lotta caveats.
Trump to his credit (along with the Congress) has been ratcheting up the sanctions on North Korea for a year now. And North Korea is starting to feel the pain (unfortunately 90% of the North Korean people live a horrific life under any circumstances, and are on the verge of starving with or without sanctions.) But the sanctions are apparently making it tougher for Kim to figure out how he’s going to continue to pay his bloated military forces and the regime flunkies who keep him in power.
Kim has also been listening to an American president for some time now threatening to take military action against him if he doesn’t behave. This president even disparagingly calls him “rocket man.” Kim might be inclined not to take President Trump too seriously. Except for the fact that this president seems to actually follow through on his promises – one after another. And Kim just may be next on that list.
The actual announcement that Trump and Kim would meet took nearly everyone by surprise. It was announced by the South Koreans. And the reaction by most media commentators was initially very positive. CNN’s Erin Burnett (usually a reliable liberal) went so far as to say that if Donald Trump could “solve the North Korean problem, he’d be going down as a great president, there’s no way around that.” Well the positive attitude from the mainstream press lasted about five minutes, if that. The Morning Joe crew on MSNBC the next morning was spinning the theory that Trump announced he would meet with North Korea to distract attention from the Stormy Daniels scandal.
Whatever the motivation, it’s my view that a face to face meeting is far preferable to war. And it seemed that military action was the direction we were headed without some intervening event. And this could very well be that intervening event.
My advice to the President would be the following. Take Ronald Reagan’s attitude when dealing with the Russians one step further. Reagan said “trust but verify.” I’d advise “distrust and verify.”
This is not the North Koreans’ first rodeo. They’ve negotiated previous deals with previous American administrations (accompanied by our allies and the Russians and Chinese) and then broken those deals time and again. The deals have typically been along the lines of, we give them food and oil in return for a promise to end their nuclear program; they take our offerings, then cheat and continue their rogue program in secret, and eventually in public.
So President Trump needs to review with specificity the history of previous negotiations with the North Koreans, and learn from those encounters. True, Kim’s father was in charge in those days, but this rotten apple didn’t fall far from that rotten apple tree (or from the rotten grandfather’s for that matter.)
Let’s face it, Donald Trump is anything but a typical president (if there is such a thing.) Most presidents would have had the details of the negotiations worked out, and virtually agreed upon, before the Heads of State ever met. But Trump is a gambler. He’s a risk taker. And maybe that’s just what it will take to solve what has seemed like an intractable problem for decades now.
He’s probably the only American president who would ever have approached the confounding North Korea problem in this manner. But he may just be the only one capable of solving it – without war. We’ll know soon enough.