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Does it unnerve anyone that the same mistakes the Trump White House made before last year's Singapore summit with Kim Jong Un are being made all over again? Once again, w/ just days to go, T's best pitch for the summit is literally 'we'll see what happens.' I.e., Trump has no /1
idea what's coming and is just winging it. Once again, T himself has done no prep; he clearly knows nothing more about Korea, nukes, or missiles than 10 months ago. Once again,neither Trump nor his natsec team have given any kind of programmatic address to inform the public of /2
even the widest possible parameters of what kind of deal we might strike. So the rest of us are in the dark too. Once again, Team Trump is negotiating the final statement with only days to go before the meeting. Once again, Trump is giving blustery press conferences claiming /3
claiming huge progress over Obama who was apparently a war-monger (which is false btw). Once again, T is making weird real estate references for his NK deal - last year to building condos there; this year to placing money in escrow - bc Trump never reads anything and so has y /4
ridiculously limited horizons. Once again the N Koreans are slow-walking the prep, focusing more the summit optics and arrangements for the photo-ops than the substance. And once again, Trump is fawning all over 'Chairman Kim' while sharply attacking non-nuclear opponents like /5
Iran and Venezuela, signally every US opponent in the world to nuke up as fast as possible. ...For the life of me, I can't understand why anyone thinks a balance-positive Trump breakthrough is likely. Sure, we can just give them stuff and call it a 'deal.' And at this point, T /6
is so desperate to change the news cycle that he may well sign anything next week just to get a 'win.' (Certainly S Korean conservatives are increasingly worried about that.) The real trick though is getting a good deal, where Trump actually gets some juicy concessions out of /7
NK at last, and there is almost nothing in the last year to suggest that Trump can do that. And I don't just mean the logic of nuclear deterrence, which strongly suggests NK will hold onto its nukes no matter what. I also mean the massive US leadership failure. Trump isn't /8
taking this seriously. He obviously knows nothing about the issues at hand, which opens him wide up to manipulation by the North (as in those flattering KJU letters). His real animus re: Korea is for SK, which he sees as a security free-rider. He clearly admires Kim JU as a /9
tyrant, like he does Putin & the Sauds. His proposed solutions - condos, escrow accounts, throwing money at NK - are painfully uncreative, coming nowhere near the scale of concessions needed to get the NKs to give up something as valuable as their nukes. His rhetoric on Korea /10
varies wildly from the frightening (fire & fury) to the disturbing (the POTROK as an appeaser) to the bizarre (the DMZ as a border security model for the US southern border) to the cringe-worthy (falling in love with KJU). Yet despite all this evidence that Trump is grossly /11
unserious, uninformed, and reckless on Korea, we keep hearing that somehow this incoherent, shambolic US effort is going to do what serious US presidents in the past could not. If T does pull this off it's bc either a) blind luck, or b) he strikes a balance-negative deal any /12
POTUS would reject bc it is empirically a win for N Korea. Trump won't care of course, and Fox will back him up. But let's just be honest up front, the likelihood that Trump can pull a good deal - not any deal, but a good one - out of Kim is very low. Just remember all the /12
pre-Singapore hype - CVID! a Nobel Peace Prize! - and what actually came out of it. I'd bet that is what Hanoi is all over again. END
