The United States President Took Kim Jong-un 'At His Word,' Because That's How We Roll Now
The nuclear summit between the United States and North Korea is over in Hanoi, Vietnam, and there's no deal. That seems bad if you focus on the fact that Donald Trump, American president, billed himself as an Artful Dealmaker, and as the only person who could save us from the nuclear war of which we were on the brink before he took office, but which he also made up. However, some onlookers point out that the threat of escalation still may be lower now than before talks began-and certainly than it was when the president was calling Kim Jong-un "Little Rocket Man" and claiming he had a bigger button than the NoKo dictator. And maybe No Deal is better than the Show Deal that came out of the last summit.
Anyway, the president held a press conference at this second summit's conclusion. In between occasionally comprehensible assessments of where the two sides were and why they failed to reach an agreement, Trump said the talks ended with a handshake and that "the relationship was very warm, and when we walked away it was a very friendly walk." That was after he offered that Jong-un "wants to de-nuke, but he wants to just do areas that are less important than the areas that we want." He denied reports the U.S. walked back its demands for full denuclearization.
“It was about the sanctions," you see. "Basically, they wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety, and we couldn't do that."
And then there was this:
Here's the video of Trump defending Kim Jong Un on the case of Otto Warmbier, the American student who died last year after being imprisoned in North Korea.
"He tells me that he didn't know about it, and I will take him at his word." Via ABC pic.twitter.com/Gcz6RtD8Li- Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) February 28, 2019
Why? Why does the president take Jong-un "at his word"? What good is the word of the North Korean dictator? And does anyone really believe that a prisoner who's a citizen of a dictatorship's No. 1 foreign adversary gets treatment without input from the leader of the dictatorship? That prisoner, Otto Warmbier, was a college student from Ohio whose family says he was tortured in a North Korean prison. He was released and flown back to the U.S. in 2017, but was in a coma from which he never recovered.
Then again, as the Washington Post's Philip Rucker pointed out, the president also took Russian strongman Vladimir Putin at his word about whether he interfered in the 2016 election-a position that contradicted Trump's own intelligence agencies. The president took Mohammed bin Salman at his word when he said he had nothing to do with the atrocious murder of U.S.-resident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Again, that directly contradicted U.S. intelligence, which found MBS ordered the assassination. And Trump once again disputed his own intelligence agencies' findings on Thursday, when he Both Sides-d the question of whether North Korea really intends to denuclearize. U.S. intelligence found Kim's regime has no such intention, which has set Trump off attacking them before.
Quite simply, the President of the United States loves authoritarians and dictators. Apparently, at the last summit in Singapore that resulted in the Show Deal, Trump told Jong-un he's a rich kid who turned out well. This, the same Jong-un who ordered the murder of his own uncle with an anti-aircraft gun and of his half-brother with a nerve agent classified as a weapon of mass destruction. The same Jong-un whom the United Nations found has committed "crimes against humanity" including "enslavement, extermination, forced abortion, imprisonment, murder, rape and other forms of sexual violence, and torture." Trump previously seized on these truths to criticize Jong-un on the world stage. Now he says they're BFFs.
Trump is apparently under the impression he can trick Jong-un into making a deal if he butters him up enough, as if Jong-un doesn't have intelligence services of his own or can't get a copy of The New York Times. Perhaps our fearless leader is trying to stuff this into a paradigm with which he's familiar: say, the New York real estate world, where you'd have to glad-hand some schmuck to get a change to zoning laws before you hire a contractor you'll eventually stiff.
This is the big leagues, where his predecessor, President Barack Obama, negotiated a nuclear agreement with Iran without publicly suggesting the leadership there was composed of great guys he'd love to grab a beer with. He did not have to butter up the Ayatollah in public to get a deal that Trump promptly tore up because Obama Did It. Like Obama was right to reach out to a bad actor to avoid a larger conflict, Trump is right to seek diplomacy here. But you don't have to continually erase the millions of victims of the North Korean regime with talk you're "in love" with its "very honorable" leader.
Under Obama, the U.S. rallied the international community to make a deal with Iran that was attractive to both sides in practical terms. That's why the Europeans and Iranians are all still signed on to it. Believe it or not, the best-case scenario for a North Korean deal might be something resembling the Iran Deal, though don't expect anyone involved to admit it. If it ever happens, expect Trump to pass it off as something else entirely, like he pretended his trade deal with Canada and Mexico was a dramatic departure from NAFTA.
While the outcome of this summit is in no way catastrophic, we're once again reminded that hiring someone with no experience in any relevant field is not a great recruiting strategy when you're looking for a President of the United States. It's best not to compound that by choosing someone who's fundamentally incurious about the world. But the bar right now is avoiding nuclear holocaust, and Trump cleared it once again. Let's celebrate! Just don't Google "India" or "Pakistan."
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