History may have good things to say about President Trump’s summit meetings with foreign adversaries. But that is only likely to be so if he uses them sparingly, with preconditions that act as leverage, and with strong enforcement to hold foreign leaders to their word.
This would be a change.
On Monday, Trump said he is willing to meet Iranian President Hassan Rouhani without preconditions “at any time.” A meeting at some point in the future may be of value, but not now. Successive summits of questionable substance with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Rouhani would be an eye-popping trifecta.
A lesson that Trump needs to learn from his summits in Singapore with the North Korean tyrant, and in Helsinki with the Russian dictator, is that a meeting with the American president is much sought after because it is highly valuable, and must not be sold cheaply. A meeting with Rouhani must occur only if it caps a real change of heart by Tehran, and does not reward the malignant mullahs’ bluster on the international stage.
Trump seems unaware that his recent summit record is poor, to put it not more strongly. Following his June meeting with Kim, the president proudly declared that “there is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea.” Believing, apparently, that he had scored a diplomatic masterstroke that eluded his predecessors, Trump added: “President Obama said that North Korea was our biggest and most dangerous problem. No longer – sleep well tonight!”
Nemesis follows hubris, and the folly of Trump’s premature crowing was evident. North Korea’s history is one of deceit and deliberate falsehood, both to foreign interlocutors and to its own benighted people. Trump’s error has become obvious with reports of North Korean research on a new ballistic missile system. Trump has known about this for weeks while continuing to claim that Kim is acting constructively. This is neither candid nor wise.
The Singapore summit has so far accomplished nothing other than lending the Hermit Kingdom a great measure of useful prestige, relief from new sanctions, and weaker Chinese enforcement of existing sanctions. Pyongyang released American hostages and repatriated the remains of Americans killed in the Korean War. But these things do nothing to reduce its nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile threat. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s efforts to extract a timeline for denuclearization hit a brick wall as thick as the demilitarized zone on the 38th parallel.
The error of an Iran summit isn’t revealed solely by Trump’s travails with North Korea. In Helsinki, without an agenda and apparently blue-skying his confrontation (if that’s the right word) with Putin, the American president was disgracefully weak and looked it. It took the White House a week of damage control to reassure the nation that Trump would not hand American citizens to Russian interrogators.
Context is next to credibility in international relations. A meeting now with Rouhani would suggest Trump is willing to give up much without receiving anything substantial in return.
Iran has spent the past two weeks issuing terrorist threats not just against the U.S. but also against international shipping lanes and civilians around the globe. Why suggest rewarding that sort of thuggery with a summit? I would suggest that Trump is negotiating to avoid annoying the Iranian regime. Weak again.
To be clear, Trump is right to believe in the power of face-to-face diplomacy to extinguish enmities and bend the course of history toward American interests. If diplomacy with North Korea is ultimately successful, and it may be in the long run, Trump will have earned an illustrious spot in history books.
But Trump must remember that his power reaches far beyond words. He commands the power to make life much better or worse for adversaries. He also has the responsibility to provide security for us and our allies. But by offering summits profligately without expectations of what should come before or after, Trump detaches his power from the purpose of summits. In doing so, he makes effective diplomacy more unlikely.
