A month after the US-North Korea summit, the Hermit Kingdom has reverted to frustrating form.
That Nobel Peace Prize that Donald Trump thinks he deserves for his efforts to strike a denuclearization agreement with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un? Alas for the president’s ego, it is receding like a mirage into a distance defined by diplomatic difficulties. Which is to say, it is increasingly apparent that the vague “agreement” Trump and Kim signed amidst huge pageantry, pomp, and propaganda may not be worth the paper it was written on.
That’s not to say that Trump doesn’t deserve some credit for ratcheting down the belligerent rhetoric with Kim and embracing negotiations. He does. But by forgoing the detailed diplomatic preparation before the Singapore summit, he went about these negotiations in a way that made that goal even more unlikely.
That much became clear last weekend, when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo traveled to North Korea to try to flesh out the details of Kim’s supposed willingness to give up his nuclear weapons. As he tries to put specifics to blandishments, Pompeo is hoping to get North Korea to stipulate to a concrete definition of what denuclearization means, to have that nation reveal its various weapons sites, and to agree to a denuclearization timeline.
It turns out, though, that the North Korean strong boy wasn’t as susceptible to Trump’s deal-making process as the latter thought.
