In 1986, Ronald Reagan addressed the nation after he famously walked away from a summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland.
In the speech, Reagan explained his reasoning for rejecting any agreement that would force the United States to suspend development of missile defense. But at the same time, he emphasized to Americans that there was another “fundamental” issue beyond arms control: human rights.
“I also made it plain, once again, that an improvement of the human condition within the Soviet Union is indispensable for an improvement in bilateral relations with the United States,” Reagan said.
Significantly, Reagan did not view the issue of human rights as unrelated to arms control negotiations. “For a government that will break faith with its own people cannot be trusted to keep faith with foreign powers,” he said. “So, I told Mr. Gorbachev — again in Reykjavik, as I had in Geneva — we Americans place far less weight upon the words that are spoken at meetings such as these than upon the deeds that follow.”
Reagan’s insight — that how a government treats its own people needs to be taken seriously when negotiating a deal that will depend on trust — should be instructive to President Trump as he continues negotiations with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.
Unfortunately, to this point Trump has taken the opposite approach — downplaying and even defending Kim’s human rights record.
In a press conference following the Singapore summit, Trump said of Kim, “He is very talented. Anybody that takes over a situation like he did, at 26 years of age, and is able to run it, and run it tough — I don’t say he was nice or I don’t say anything about it — he ran it.”
In a follow up interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, in response to an unrelated question, Trump interjected of Kim: “His country does love him. His people, you see the fervor. They have a great fervor.” That is a completely inaccurate description of the attitude of the populace in an oppressive society that is effectively a prison with 25 million inmates.
Fox News’ Bret Baier also gave him a chance to address human rights, noting that Kim is a “killer” who is “clearly executing people.” Trump’s response was again to say, “He’s a tough guy. Hey, when you take over a country, tough country, tough people, and you take it over from your father … if you could do that at 27-years old, I mean, that’s 1 in 10,000 that could do that.”
When Baier pressed that “he’s still done some really bad things,” Trump responded, “Yeah, but so have a lot of other people done some really bad things. I mean I can go through a lot of nations where a lot of bad things were done.”
This is the same sort of moral relativism that conservatives have complained about for decades when liberals have done it.
Defenders of Trump, many of whom chastised President Barack Obama’s dealings with totalitarian regimes, have been resorting to a straw man argument that raising human rights is really part of a neocon push for war that Trump is trying to avoid. They argue that North Korean human rights abuses are secondary to making sure that the communist regime cannot threaten the U.S. with nuclear missiles.
Yet if Trump were merely arguing that he didn’t believe in foreign interventions on purely humanitarian grounds, or he was opposed to regime change for the sake of promoting democracy, that would be one thing. Far from merely exercising restraint, however, Trump has gone out of his way to put a golden gloss on Kim’s atrocious record in North Korea.
The Reagan experience shows that there was a way for Trump to have met with Kim without having to make excuses for his human rights abuses. Using the prestige of the presidency to rhetorically take a stand for human rights is a far cry from advocating regime change and putting U.S. troops on the line to impose democracy on a foreign country.
In a 2004 interview with the Weekly Standard, former imprisoned dissident Natan Sharansky explained how inspired prisoners celebrated when Reagan called the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire” in 1983.
“It was the brightest, most glorious day,” Sharansky recalled. “Finally a spade had been called a spade. Finally, Orwell’s Newspeak was dead. President Reagan had from that moment made it impossible for anyone in the West to continue closing their eyes to the real nature of the Soviet Union.”
In contrast, Trump has spun Kim’s acts of oppression in almost heroic terms. Yet the reality is that Kim denies free speech rights, executes opponents, maintains massive gulags full of political prisoners that have been raped, starved, and tortured. In North Korea, Christians have been imprisoned and killed for practicing their faith, which is viewed as a threat to the state, and women have been forced to have abortions. This isn’t “tough.” It’s evil.
