“I know the smartest negotiators in the world. I know the good ones. I know the bad ones. I know the overrated ones. You get a lot of them that are overrated. They’re not good. They think they are. They get good stories, because the newspapers get buffaloed. But they’re not good. . . . Believe me, folks. We will do very, very well—very, very well.”
That was, of course, Donald Trump announcing his presidential candidacy in June of 2015. The word negotiate and its cognates peppered that speech, and indeed his presidential campaign. It was Trump’s biggest, most important, and most often-repeated promise: He would negotiate better deals for the United States. Many voters who plumped for him over Hillary Clinton did so precisely because they thought he was the great negotiator.
We are prepared to accept the possibility that a truly great negotiator may from time to time say things in public that upset or even scandalize the public. But it’s impossible to see what the U.S. gains by lashing out at Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau simply because he expressed unhappiness with U.S. tariffs in a press conference in his own country, and at almost the same time suggesting that world’s most aggressive supporter of terrorism and rogue regimes—Russia—should be let back into the G7. Russia was ejected from the G8 (as it then was) in 2014 after the annexation of Crimea.
Not only were the criticisms of Trudeau pointless. They rallied American allies against the U.S. just as Trump heads into a potentially far more consequential summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.
But that summit itself is a product of diplomatic folly. Kim first asked for the summit, remember, and Trump agreed, then backed out of it in light of Kim’s hostile rhetoric, then agreed to it again. By agreeing to it at all, however, Trump has created for himself a diplomatic encounter he cannot win. It’s not just that the North Koreans will be, as they always have been in high-level diplomatic talks, far better prepared than their Western counterparts, even as Trump boasts that he has little need to prepare at all. Nor is it just that the Kim dynasty has a long history of breaking peace deals the minute those deals are no longer useful to the regime’s malign purposes.
The U.S. has nothing to gain by engaging in talks with Kim Jong-un. Leaving aside the meaning of the term denuclearization to the North Koreans—generally they mean by it the uniting of the Koreas under Pyongyang’s rule and the departure of American troops from the peninsula—the plain fact is that Kim has no plans to get rid of the rudimentary nuclear weapons his regime has sacrificed nearly everything to produce. The regime has created a twisted but quite real national identity based squarely on its power to engage in a nuclear confrontation with the West and, especially, with the United States. Nothing Trump says, nothing he offers, is going to change their minds, whatever they may say. Negotiations intended to achieve the unachievable goal of genuine denuclearization can only benefit Pyongyang with concessions and international prestige.
Absent an undeniable diplomatic victory, then, it’s hard to see how Trump avoids failure on his own terms. As he said in 2015, he knows negotiators—he knows the good ones, the bad ones, the overrated ones. So does the American public.
