The June 12 meeting in Singapore between Donald Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong‑un has generated a bewildering array of responses from observers around the world. These responses do not fall along predictable ideological lines. Back and forth across the ideological span, we find everything from cautious optimism to outrage.
That alone warns against confident pronouncements about what the dialogue between Trump and Kim may produce. We’re reminded, too, that this is far from the first time an American president has engaged with a dictator and his regime, often in the face of sharp criticism. Dwight Eisenhower hosted Joseph Stalin’s loyal subordinate Nikita Khrushchev at Camp David. Ronald Reagan received Mikhail Gorbachev at the White House when the Soviet Union’s gulags were very much operational. Richard Nixon visited Mao Zedong, a man responsible for the deaths of 60 million people.
None of this justifies Trump’s sitting alongside Kim Jong-un as though the latter were a legitimate leader rather than an international hoodlum and a murderer. Nor is it beyond dispute that these earlier American presidents were right to treat the leaders of evil regimes with outward deference. But it does suggest that presidents are sometimes called upon to glad-hand men whom they know to be guilty of grave crimes.
In sharp contrast to previous presidents, however, Trump has gone out of his way to exacerbate the already deeply vexed symbolism of the meeting. Earlier presidents were aware of the need to speak carefully, knowing that their adversaries would scrutinize their every word in search of weaknesses to exploit. Trump blathered about Kim as though he were holding a campaign rally. “Great personality and very smart,” the president said about a man who murdered his uncle and half-brother, a man whose regime imprisons entire families when even one member is suspected of a thought-crime. “I learned he’s a very talented man,” announced Trump.
The verbal follies have only continued in the days since the meeting. After he landed at Andrews Air Force Base, he tweeted: “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.” And went on: “President Obama said that North Korea was our biggest and most dangerous problem. No longer—sleep well tonight!” As if a single sit-down were all it took to tame a totalitarian regime that worships its twisted leader as a god.
There were substantive follies, too. The administration had insisted that there would be no negotiations until Pyongyang took—as Vice President Mike Pence put it—“credible, verifiable, and concrete steps toward denuclearization.” The Kim regime has taken no such steps. The North does claim it destroyed its main nuclear facility, the one at Punggye-ri, but the site may well have fallen into disuse. Journalists were allowed to film an explosion, but that is all the verification Trump got.
The United States, meanwhile, made a significant concession: the cessation of joint military exercises with South Korea. Trump, using Pyongyang’s own propagandistic language by calling the drills “very provocative,” surprised both South Korea and the Pentagon with this concession—admittedly a nonbinding announcement. He dismissed the importance of these exercises by calling them “tremendously expensive,” but that is one reason Kim wants them to stop. Every time we run a ground drill, every time a U.S. or South Korean jet flies a sortie, the North runs a reciprocal operation. These are painfully expensive for a government that has no money. These war games are in essence another sanction on North Korea, there as part of the maximum-pressure policy. Lifting them eases the pressure.
Trump made a similar case regarding the U.S. troop presence in South Korea. The troops will not be coming home now, he said, in an interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier on Air Force One after the talks. But, he added: “I would love to get the military out as soon as we can because it costs a lot of money and a lot of money for us. We don’t get paid fully for that military which—you know—I’ll be talking to South Korea about. But we have 32,000 soldiers in South Korea. I would like to get them home.”
The United States is the leader of the free world. We created a global, rules-based order that redounds to the benefit of no one so much as ourselves. The presence of U.S. troops in South Korea has been crucial to maintaining the uneasy peace on the peninsula. It has allowed us to extend America’s benevolent sphere of influence in East Asia and protect important allies and our access to their markets. Whatever money we’d save by withdrawing our troops tomorrow would be spent many times over in the long term, with an unstable North Korean regime and an expansionist China.
The agreement that came out of the summit is, as such joint statements often are, bereft of substance. It doesn’t even define “denuclearization.” For the United States, the term means North Korea getting rid of its nuclear weapons program in toto; for North Korea, it almost certainly means the peninsula being rid of the U.S. presence.
But the agreement is not for that reason meaningless. The agreement will have results—destructive ones. China and Russia will almost certainly use the U.S.-North Korean rapprochement as an excuse to circumvent sanctions on Pyongyang even more flagrantly than they already do. Other rogue states will conclude they, too, should acquire nuclear weapons so that they, too, can demand meetings with the American president. Kim, if the history of engaging with thug regimes is any guide, will interpret his newfound parity with the American president as license to engage in greater criminality—especially since few words were said in Singapore about the human-rights abuses in the North.
In the interview with Bret Baier, Trump turned a question about these horrific abuses into an excuse to praise Kim Jong-un. “He’s a tough guy. Hey, when you take over a country, tough country, with tough people and you take it over from your father—I don’t care who you are, what you are, how much of an advantage you have. If you can do that at 27 years old, you—I mean that’s 1 in 10,000 that could do that. . . . So he is a very smart guy.”
We strongly suspect Kim Jong-un will do exactly what his father and grandfather did. Talks with the United States will begin with sunshiney rhetoric. Once there are obligations for the North Koreans, they will not meet them and instead will accuse the United States of duplicity. And eventually, whatever agreement our diplomats fashion with their North Korean counterparts will fall apart, with the Kim regime stronger as a consequence of sanctions abeyance and further along in its quest for a workable nuclear-warhead delivery system. Time is on Kim’s side whenever we ease the financial pressures on the North.
Yet, leaving aside its risible implementation, Trump’s approach of meeting first with Kim and working out the details later is not obviously worse than what this country has tried for 30 years: working out the details first and watching the various Kims flout them. It’s unlikely that Kim will denuclearize and decide he wants prosperity more than he wants global conflict and absolute control over his population. Unlikely but not impossible. For the moment, North Korea remains this nation’s biggest and most dangerous problem. We will not sleep well.
