Donny's Pyongyang Adventure

The North Korean regime has been trying to invite a US president to Pyongyang for direct talks for two decades now in order to prove to the world that its nuclear program is powerful enough to bring even the leader of the free world to its doorstep to negotiate as the regime's equal on North Korea's terms.  

Clinton, Dubya, and Obama all passed on such an obvious diplomatic trap that would accomplish nothing but upside for the Kim regime and establish a new diplomatic paradigm that the world should be coming to Pyongyang directly at its whim.

No major world leader would be blockheaded enough to give the North Koreans exactly what they wanted: proof that their nuclear program is absolutely justified as a tool to get America and the western world to the table and assure to the rest of the planet that a nuclear program is exactly what your tinpot dictatorship needs in order to get respect on the global stage.

So guess what goddamn idiot Donald Trump announced he was going to do this spring.

North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, has invited President Trump to meet for negotiations over its nuclear program, an audacious diplomatic overture that would bring together two strong-willed, idiosyncratic leaders who have traded threats of war.

The White House said that Mr. Trump had accepted the invitation, and Chung Eui-yong, a South Korean official who conveyed it, told reporters that the president would meet with Mr. Kim within two months.

“He expressed his eagerness to meet President Trump as soon as possible,” Mr. Chung said at the White House on Thursday evening after meeting the president. Mr. Trump, he said, agreed to “meet Kim Jong-un by May to achieve permanent denuclearization.”

The president expressed his optimism about the meeting in a post on Twitter, saying that Mr. Kim had “talked about denuclearization with the South Korean Representatives, not just a freeze.”

“Also, no missile testing by North Korea during this period of time,” Mr. Trump added. “Great progress being made but sanctions will remain until an agreement is reached. Meeting being planned!”

Mr. Chung, whose talks with Mr. Kim on Monday in Pyongyang resulted in the invitation, noted that the North Korean leader said he understood that joint military exercises with the United States and South Korea would go ahead as scheduled after the end of the Paralympic Games this month.

For Mr. Trump, a meeting with Mr. Kim, a leader he has threatened with “fire and fury” and has derided as “Little Rocket Man,” is a breathtaking gamble. No sitting American president has ever met a North Korean leader, and Mr. Trump himself has repeatedly vowed that he would not commit the error of his predecessors by being drawn into a protracted negotiation in which North Korea extracted concessions from the United States but held on to key elements of its nuclear program.

Meeting Mr. Kim now, rather than at the end of a negotiation when the United States would presumably have extracted concessions from North Korea, is an enormous gesture by the president. But Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim share a penchant for bold, dramatic moves, and their personal participation in a negotiation could take it in unexpected directions.

Sure, those "unexpected directions" include "going completely off the rails with a nuclear adversary". The rank amateurism and sheer stupidity of the agreement cannot be overstated, as Ankit Panda explains.

For Kim, a meeting with Trump will be an unalloyed propaganda victory. Trump will assuredly not “achieve permanent denuclearization,” despite what he told Chung. Instead, Kim will be given the opportunity to stage-manage a photo-op with a U.S. president. The costs of a freeze in nuclear and ballistic missile testing for the next two months are relatively minor for North Korea compared to the benefits of a meeting with Trump.

In a normal world, too, there could be a serious opportunity in direct leader-level talks between the United States and North Korea, but Trump is far from a normal president. The United States is woefully lacking in subject matter expertise on the Korean Peninsula at the highest levels of government, with the State Department’s special representative for North Korea policy, Joseph Yun, having just stepped down last week and the post of ambassador to Seoul still vacant. Trump has the intelligence community behind him, but it’s doubtful that he’s capable of being successfully briefed.

A face-to-face meeting with Kim would require Trump to exercise cautious, measured engagement. He’d have to hear out what the North Korean leader has to say and know where the red lines lie. North Korea’s long-term play on the Korean Peninsula is to “decouple” the United States and South Korea.

During his campaign for the presidency, Trump showed more interest in sitting down for a “hamburger” with Kim than he did in the alliance with South Korea, complaining about the costs of maintaining a forward-based military presence there. Those instincts still live within Trump and are ripe for exploitation by North Korea, which has had plenty of time to study him.

Trump has shown time and again a deep misunderstanding of the basic rules of statecraft (as well as economics, physics, and pretty damn well near everything else.)  The odds of him getting rolled by Kim like a drunk bum at an Staten Island policemen's ball are approaching 199%.  Disaster doesn't begin to cover it.

But, much like the GOP tax bill, the dismantling of Obamacare, and the new trade war ignited by Trump's steel and Aluminum tariffs, the effects of this catastrophe won't be fully felt until it's far too late for the next person in the White House to even begin to clean it up.