The United States and South Korea canceled a training exercise involving B-52 bombers this week, after Pyongyang canceled a round of talks with Seoul.<\/b>
\nNorth Korea has been seeking a one-on-one meeting between its supreme leader and the U. S. president for more than two decades. And it isn\u2019t difficult to understand why: For the leader of the world\u2019s most powerful country to sit down with his North Korean counterpart would be to bestow an aura of legitimacy and international importance on the rogue state\u2019s regime.
For this very reason, Donald Trump\u2019s immediate predecessors declined to honor North Korea\u2019s request, absent sweeping concessions that Pyongyang proved unwilling to make. Our current president, however, (reportedly) accepted Kim Jong-un\u2019s invitation on a whim, and without setting any significant preconditions.
His White House proceeded to leak word that Trump viewed securing a deal with North Korea to be his \u201c great man of history \u201d moment \u2014 and that the administration\u2019s staffers were already fantasizing about the Nobel Peace Prize that the president might win for forging such a historic agreement.
Now, one could argue that this is an example of Trump using his superhuman narcissism for good. Perhaps, previous American presidents had been too deferential to D. C. conventional wisdom on the Korean conflict \u2014 while Trump, following his lust for personal glory instead of the foreign policy Establishment\u2019s advice, was making a diplomatic concession that would genuinely bolster the cause of world peace.
After all, Trump\u2019s acceptance of the summit was followed by a productive meeting between Kim and South Korean president Moon Jae-in; Pyongyang\u2019s release of three American prisoners; and North Korea\u2019s announcement of a plan to demolish its nuclear testing site.
But one could also argue that Trump is simply getting played. In recent days, North Korea has abruptly recast a summit with the American president as kind of favor to the United States \u2014 one that entitles them to concessions up-front. Earlier this week, Pyongyang suspended talks with South Korea, in protest of a scheduled joint-military exercise between the American and South Korean air forces. Hours later, Kim threatened to cancel his summit with Trump unless the U. S. indicated that it had no interest in coercing the regime into \u201cunilateral nuclear abandonment,\u201d as national security adviser John Bolton had implied.
Trump responded Thursday by reassuring Kim that the U. S. would provide \u201cvery strong\u201d protections to his totalitarian regime, should he agree to a disarmament deal. And on Friday, The Wall Street Journal revealed that the U. S. had canceled the military exercise that had offended Pyongyang.
The latter move came at the urging of Seoul, which asked not to participate, so as to avoid generating tensions that could undermine the upcoming summit between Trump and Kim.
Again: One could argue that the America\u2019s aberrantly conciliatory posture toward North Korea is a good thing. It isn\u2019t all that unreasonable for Kim to ask the United States not to engage in dress rehearsals for war against his country; nor is it hard to understand why Pyongyang might take exception to John Bolton suggesting that Trump would demand it pursue the \u201cLibya model\u201d of nuclear disarmament.
But it remains the case that our deal-maker-in-chief has already managed to take what Pyongyang once viewed as a great concession (a summit with the U. S. president), and turned it into an ostensible source of leverage for his North Korean counterpart.<\/p>\n

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