Robin Wright writes about the off-again, on-again summit between North Korea and the United States, which was rescheduled after a meeting between President Trump and the North Korean Kim Yong Chol.
On live television on Friday afternoon, President Trump had a lingering schmooze with the second-most powerful man in North Korea—a former spymaster still legally sanctioned by the United States—as they said goodbye on the White House lawn. Trump and Kim Yong Chol chitchatted through interpreters. They smiled broadly. They posed for a round of photographs. After Trump gave him a final pat on the shoulder and a hearty thank you, the North Korean departed in a motorcade of black Chevrolet S. U. V.s. With that, the summit with North Korea was back on, for June 12th, in Singapore. Trump appeared elated as he walked toward the cordoned-off area where reporters waited for him to make an announcement.
“It went very well,” Trump declared. “And now we’re going to deal.” The meeting had been arranged simply so that a letter could be delivered from the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, in a symbolic show of good intentions. But the meeting went on for almost two hours, as the President repeatedly noted. And Trump actually didn’t open the sealed letter, he told reporters. “I may be in for a big surprise, folks.” Just a week ago, Trump cancelled the summit —the first ever between American and North Korean leaders—in a dramatic letter to Kim, whose government had not been answering U. S. telephone calls about summit preparations and terms.
A week of on-again, off-again diplomacy with North Korea seems to have changed Trump’s expectations. For weeks, the President insisted that he wanted North Korea to agree to complete denuclearization in a single session. And, on Friday, Trump told reporters that he still has lofty ambitions. “You’re going to have a very positive result in the end,” he promised. “It will ultimately be a successful process.”
But Trump appears to have finally recognized that the art of diplomacy is more complex, more nuanced, and potentially takes much longer than the art of the business deal. As he has been hinting over the past week, the President acknowledged on Friday that Singapore will be only “a beginning” after decades of hostility.
