I give President Trump credit for trying to defuse one of the world’s most dangerous places—the Korean peninsula. Some 36,754 Americans were killed during the Korean War, which has not officially ended (there has been a truce since 1953). Ever since, U.S. forces have stood watch. By the way, 7,665 Americans are still listed as missing from that terrible conflict.
But the collapse Thursday of his summit with Kim Jong Un, the brutal, murderous North Korean dictator, should come as no surprise. Kim, whose deadly arsenal of nuclear weapons is his security blanket, will never give them up. It’s all he has, and the fact that the president of the United States has twice traveled all the way to Asia to treat him as an equal only reinforces this view.
Read: Trump says talks with North Korea’s Kim broke down over lifting of sanctions
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Trump is eager to prove 1) that he can be a dealmaker on the world stage and 2) outdo his predecessors who got nowhere with the North Koreans. For these reasons, critics feared that the president would give up too much to Kim. Instead, he gave up nothing and chose to walk away. Good for him. No deal is better than a bad one.
That being said, Trump made some horrible mistakes with Kim, calling him a “friend” and buying his ludicrous claim that he didn’t know anything about the brutal treatment of Otto Warmbier, the 22-year old Ohio student who died in a U.S. hospital with severe brain damage—days after being released from 17 months of North Korean captivity. Trump’s eagerness to trust brutal dictators like Kim, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and others—while bickering with and belittling America’s democratic allies—continues to be both disturbing and alarming, and reflects the president’s own authoritarian impulses.
So what happens now? History suggests that future events depend in no small part on how adversaries view a sitting president. Weakness, or the perception of it, can invite danger. Strength can serve as a deterrent.
John F. Kennedy provides an example of the former. In June 1961, Kennedy, in office just a few months, met Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna. JFK, by his own admission, got eaten alive. Khrushchev saw the 44-year old president as a lightweight who could be pushed around. It was this perception that led, 16 months later, to the Cuban Missile Crisis—which nearly sparked nuclear war. The Soviets learned that Kennedy was tougher than first realized—but had they known it from the beginning, the crisis might have been averted.
Ronald Reagan, meantime, provides an example of the latter. Reagan, a tough-talking Cold Warrior who embarked on a massive U.S. milutary buildup in the early ‘80s—including installing nuclear missiles in Western Europe aimed at the Kremlin—gave the Russians no room for misinterpretation.
Yet Reagan, with an eye on his legacy, desired to be seen as a peacemaker and spoke of ridding the world of nuclear weapons. At a summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Iceland—it was October 1986—Gorbachev gave him the chance to realize that dream. Both men agreed to make huge reductions in nuclear arsenals—but Gorbachev said he could only do that if Reagan stopped developing “Star Wars,” a space-based missile defense system. Reagan had promised the American people he would never give that up and walked away.
Reagan came home empty-handed. Was it a failure? At the time, some thought so, yet the Soviet Union, unable to compete economically or technologically with the United States, was buckling. It collapsed five years later.
Donald Trump is no Ronald Reagan. Yet in walking away, Reagan stuck to his guns and Trump is too. American sanctions on North Korea remain. U.S. troops in South Korea remain. Trump has hinted in the past of his desire to remove them, setting off alarm bells in Washington and Seoul. But Trump now seems to understand that such a move can only be accompanied by a verifiable elimination by Kim of his nuclear, and while we’re at, chemical and biological weapons programs. This Kim is unwilling to do. Yet as a goodwill gesture he has stopped, for now, missile testing. This is welcome, as is the elimination of the incendiary and unstable talk we saw in 2017, when Trump threatened to destroy “Rocket Man,” while Kim threatened a nuclear strike on “the heart of the U.S.”
That each of these bizarre men seem to have some sort of personal rapport is better than not having it. Whether it’s Barack Obama visiting Cuba, or Donald Trump chatting it up with Kim Jong Un, there’s nothing wrong with presidents sitting down with those who dislike us—as long as they project strength, represent American values and hold firm on the long-term security interests of the United States.
“Let us never negotiate out of fear,” Kennedy said. “But let us never fear to negotiate.”
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