The Trump administration has squandered its shot with North Korea

Published July 20, 2020 8:01pm ET



The allegation from former national security adviser John Bolton that President Trump was mostly focused on the photo ops at summits with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ought to elicit a weary shrug. Trump’s disinterest in the halting, mundane, tedious, working-level diplomacy that would have added real substance to his flashy little denuclearization pact has long been obvious.

Trump “made no effort to understand the issues or to study why U.S. approaches to North Korea had failed over three previous presidencies,” according to a Foreign Affairs summary of Bolton’s account. Well, yeah, of course — a bombshell, this is not.

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