In 2018, at the urging of then–South Korean President Moon Jae-in, Trump decided to do what no sitting American president had done before: meet the head of North Korea’s Kim dynasty face-to-face. His national security advisers at the time were gobsmacked at the idea and advised against it. But there was some logic in Trump’s diplomatic gamble. First, diplomacy was better than the alternatives. Second, everything else had been tried and produced nothing but disappointment. And third, there was only one man in North Korea who could sign off on an agreement anyway, and his name was Kim Jong-un. Why not test the proposition?
By now, we all know the story. Much like the presidential diplomacy of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, which took a more bottom-up approach to the North Korean nuclear problem, Trump’s top-level interaction with a North Korean leader, which included two summits and a historic step into the Hermit Kingdom by a sitting U.S. president, couldn’t produce a comprehensive deal. Although Kim agreed to suspend nuclear and long-range missile tests as long as talks were progressing, the negotiations ultimately ran into the same big obstruction that prior efforts met with: The positions of the two sides were irreconcilable, and neither man was willing to walk away with half a loaf. Trump wanted North Korea to hand over its nuclear warheads for destruction, and Kim wanted to keep his warheads and have a blossoming bilateral relationship with the United States at the same time. Working-level discussions collapsed in October 2019, turning the joint garden strolls and cordial photo opportunities into an odd interlude.
Yet Trump never forgot about the experience. In fact, he consistently reminded anybody who would listen that his personal relationship with Kim was great, that his summitry was the right move despite the naysayers, and that he single-handedly averted what could have been a catastrophic war on the Korean Peninsula. Whether any or all of this is true is beside the point; the president clearly believes it.
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