More than 48 hours after the conclusion of the summit, President Trump’s gamble with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un continues to be the talk of the town — and the object of a whole lot of scorn.
Former diplomats, government officials from prior administrations, syndicated columnists, and on-air political consultants have all pilloried the president for walking into the biggest international meeting of his life unprepared, wanting a deal so badly that he would give away critical U.S. leverage to get it.
Some of the criticism has been fair. The joint communique marketed by Trump as “comprehensive” was so sparse and lacking of meat on the bones that one questioned whether Trump knows what the word means. The communique was not an agreement to end Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program, but a half-assed press release spelling out the same vague goals the North Koreans have agreed to numerous times since 1992. There was no timeline in the document dictating how long the negotiations and the denuclearization process would last, no parameters governing the excruciatingly difficult technical talks that will soon commence between Washington and Pyongyang, and no clear understanding on whether the Trump administration and the Kim regime are even working off the same meaning of the term “denuclearization.”
Trump’s chumminess towards Kim Jong Un during the photo-ops, post-summit press conference, and television interviews was, in a word, vomit-inducing. Pick somebody out of a line-up and ask them to say the first three words that come to mind when the name “Kim Jong Un” comes up, and people generally throw around descriptors like “warmonger,” “tyrant,” or “murderer.” Perhaps out of flattery or genuine conviction, Trump called Kim “smart,” “funny,” and “a great personality” who truly loves his people. We all know this is an absurd way to talk about a guy who poisoned his half-brother to death, executed his uncle, and keeps tens of thousands of his own people in slave labor camps — so absurd that I’m wasting space reiterating all this.
There is one argument the critics have made, however, that is as absurd as calling Kim a wonderful human being: that, because President Trump graced Kim with his presence, held a meeting with him, and shared the same stage, the Kim dynasty is legitimized as a normal member of the community of nations.
The New York Times, normally gung-ho about every diplomatic initiative the State Department undertakes, wrote an editorial that sounded as if it was crafted by Lindsey Graham-style neoconservatives. “Mr. Kim’s wins [from the summit] were obvious,” the paper comments. “He got what his father and grandfather never did — a meeting with an American president, the legitimacy of being treated as an equal as a nuclear power on the world stage, country flags standing side by side.”
Max Boot, as establishment as one can get in the foreign policy universe, churned out the same drivel in his Washington Post column. “Kim won an invaluable propaganda windfall: Ruling one of the poorest and most despotic countries in the world … he was recognized as an equal by the leader of the world’s sole superpower — not just an equal, indeed, but a valued friend.”
Boot is an expert on military and diplomatic history, but apparently, he missed the many examples in the last eighty-odd years when an American president sat down with a vicious, despicable human being in order to solve a problem, forge a pragmatic alliance, or prevent a conflict from spiraling into nuclear war.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt held meetings with Joseph Stalin, whom if memory serves me correct was not exactly an aspiring democrat with respect for human life. Millions perished under his rule, people were executed as frequently as the wind blew, and countless civilians were sent to the gulags and worked to death. Roosevelt, however, needed an ally against Adolf Hitler on the eastern front, and Stalin had the army and power to squeeze Hitler’s war machine and kill a lot of Nazis. It was a morally repugnant partnership, but a strategically correct one during a world war.
Dwight Eisenhower met with Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, in several summit meetings, including one at Camp David, in the hope that the world’s two most powerful leaders could strike up a personal rapport and introduce some stability in a bipolar world. The Soviet Union was a brutal place in Khrushchev’s time too, but Ike had a job to do as a statesman.
Richard Nixon flew to China in 1972 and toasted with Mao Zedong. Mao was an ideological zealot who directed a years-long scourge of terror throughout China to weed out dissidents and opponents of the Communist Party. The death toll of the Cultural Revolution was so high that historians can only guess the range (between 500,000 to 8 million). Nixon’s China moment, though, paid off in spades: by splitting China from the Soviet Union, Nixon pulled off one of the most brilliant geopolitical moves in modern history.
Trump is no Nixon, and Kim is no Mao. The world today is more fluid, multidimensional, and interconnected than it was in the 1960s or 70s. But the short tour through history is instructive: There are periods when an American president, due either to a lack of other options or geopolitical opportunism, decides to share a meal and a stage with a despot.
Diplomacy is not a morality contest or an award given to adversarial governments that play by the rules. It a means to an end and a cutthroat, nasty, cruel business often powered by self-interest. Those who knock Trump for legitimizing Kim Jong Un simply by meeting with him would do well to remember other cases when a U.S. president shook hands with a sociopath.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
