Our president did all the conceding.<\/b>
\n\u201cI do trust him, yeah. He really wants to do a great job for North Korea. He\u2019s de-nuking the whole place, and I think he\u2019s going to start very quickly. He really wants to do something I think terrific for their country.\u201d
So said the president of the United States on Tuesday, hours after meeting with a brutal dictator, and every word rang wrong.
To \u201ctrust\u201d North Korea\u2019s Kim Jong Un is a waste of time. His word has proven worthless, certainly when it comes to North Korean promises to abandoning nuclear weapons. North Korea first affirmed its supposed desire to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula 26 years ago.
A better word would be \u201cverify,\u201d but nothing to which Kim and Trump agreed on Monday even hints that North Korea might finally allow outside inspectors to verify a nuclear winding-down \u2014 should North Korea agree to anything of substance at all.
To say Kim will start \u201cvery quickly\u201d is salesman\u2019s rhetoric, best left to predictions about when the next Trump tower might go up. Serious negotiations \u2014 to achieve a deal that\u2019s an inch deeper than Monday\u2019s photo op \u2014 will take months, if not years, and Kim has conceded nothing.
Our president did all the conceding.
He agreed to security guarantees for North Korea. He agreed to suspend American military exercises with South Korea. He gave Kim, one of the world\u2019s great abusers of human rights, political legitimacy.
Just one good thing came of all this: The two men talked, which beats not talking. Too often, as in our nation\u2019s dealings with Cuba, American diplomacy has been a bull-headed mix of military threats and political isolation.
We welcomed Barack Obama\u2019s expression of willingness, as president, to meet with foreign adversaries, and we praised him when he visited Cuba in 2016 and met with Raul Castro. Republicans who now praise Trump for meeting with Kim, of course, excoriated Obama for meeting with Castro.
What Obama did not do was gush. He never once told Castro it was a \u201cgreat honor\u201d to meet him or praise him as \u201cvery talented.\u201d
Once again, that\u2019s nothing but Manhattan real estate talk.
Speaking of which, here\u2019s what else Trump had to say to Kim:
\u201cNorth Korea has great beaches. You see that whenever they\u2019re exploding cannons into the ocean.\u2026 Wouldn\u2019t that make a great condo?\u2026 You could have the best hotels in the world right there.\u201d
Goodness, no. Our president made a real estate pitch.
Then again, maybe Trump\u2019s got his little dictator all figured out.
Maybe Kim will abandon his nuclear ambitions, free the 100,000 men, woman and children slaving away in his gulags, quit assassinating his own relatives, and lead his nation out of the darkness, all for the promise of a nice beachfront condo.<\/p>\n

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