Have Donald Trump’s insults finally landed a knockout blow — or at the very least stunned his opponent?
Verbal sparring is Trump’s go-to move. Few leaders are prepared to step into the ring with him. But Kim did.
The Hermit Kingdom’s leader says he is intent on making nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles capable of reaching the United States.
Nothing he has done yet changes that narrative. But this week, after years of ignoring international concerns and starving his own people to feed his weapons program, he held talks with South Korean officials about halting those programs.
So has Trump’s blunt bombast actually worked?
On North Korea, Trump inherited a mess. Obama’s presidency ended just as Kim’s ticking time bomb of nuclear readiness became an urgent matter.
North Korea was always likely to be Trump’s first big diplomatic test.
We will never know how a President Hillary Clinton might have handled Kim. America took a different path and much of the world has been holding its breath ever since. But maybe now is the time to exhale.
As undiplomatic as Trump is, he appears not only to have gotten Kim’s attention, but he might have found a way to slow him down a bit.
That said, it’s very hard to tell what goes on underneath Kim’s haircut. It’s entirely possible that his talks with South Korea are simply Kim playing his old game: acting like he is going to do something in order to buy himself more time, then pushing ahead with his program as normal.
It wasn’t just Kim who paid attention to Trump’s approach for dealing with North Korea: China and Russia looked on as the US ramped up joint military exercises with South Korea and Japan.
It angered the hell out of diplomats in Beijing and Moscow, who all claimed Trump was destabilizing the region.
