Early on the morning of May 10, Donald Trump tweeted a dramatic 32-second video celebrating the return home of three U.S. citizens held until last week in North Korea. It was a made-for-TV moment, and the slick video ensured that millions of Americans who didn’t stay up until 3 a.m. to watch it live could experience this moment of triumph.
It was a triumph: for the three former detainees, for their families, for the president, and for the country. But it was also just a moment—a split second of joy amid decades of North Korean betrayal and duplicity. The president would be wise to expect that any diplomatic encounters with Kim Jong-un will be defined more by the latter than the former.
As he stood on the tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base, Trump said with evident conviction that he believes in Kim Jong-un. When ABC News’s indefatigable Jonathan Karl asked the president why the North Korean leader had chosen to release the Americans, Trump said: “I really think he wants to do something. I think he did this because I really think he wants to do something and bring that country into the real world. I really believe that, Jon, and I think that we’re going to have a success. I think this will be a very big success.”
We hope the president is right. If Trump somehow convinced Kim Jong-un to denuclearize in a comprehensive and verifiable way—through bluster, flattery, coercion, punishment, or some combination of all four—it would indeed be a very big success, one accomplished against the longest of odds. But there are three decades’ worth of reasons to believe that this won’t happen, that the sacrifices made by successive North Korean regimes to acquire nuclear weapons were not made in order one day to walk away from the very thing that won them face-to-face negotiations with the world’s superpower.
We’re confident that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton are well aware of this history and have expressed their skepticism to the president. Such concerns are sometimes reflected in the president’s language. But often they are not.
Trump lets his eagerness for a deal, for something he can tout as a victory, shape his public pronouncements in unhelpful ways. In welcoming the former prisoners home, Trump said: “We want to thank Kim Jong-un, who really was excellent to these three incredible people.” This comes after Trump’s recent comments hailing the North Korean leader as “very open and I think very honorable based on what we are seeing.”
Kim Jong-un was not, in fact, excellent to these Americans, his regime having detained them in the first place. And whatever his latest public gestures, Kim continues to preside over the most closed society on earth. Summary execution is an oft-used tool of state repression in his country, and brutal forced-labor camps operate there to this day. And let us not forget Otto Warmbier, the American college student who was arrested by the North Koreans, sentenced to hard labor, and sent home to the States in a persistent vegetative state last summer. He died six days later. Not open, not honorable.
Hours after Trump celebrated the return of the American prisoners, he announced via tweet that a face-to-face summit with Kim Jong-un would take place in Singapore on June 12. The meeting will provide the president with many made-for-TV moments and many opportunities to claim triumphs. But the risks in such a high-stakes negotiation are tremendous, particularly if Trump entertains the possibility of removing U.S. troops from South Korea, a longtime objective of the North Koreans that fits nicely with Trump’s America-first instincts.
The president has shown again and again—in his dealings with the media, with politicians here and abroad—that he’s susceptible to manipulation by flattery. There’s little doubt Kim Jong-un has been paying attention.
We don’t think Trump should hold a face-to-face meeting with the North Korean despot. We nonetheless wish the president well as he embarks on this consequential mission. And we encourage him to negotiate with John Bolton seated directly to his left and Mike Pompeo directly to his right.
