Daniel R. DePetris
Security, Asia
President Donald Trump’s summit in Hanoi, Vietnam, last week was a monumental failure for the entire world to see. Trump was unprepared, too self-assured about his negotiating abilities with a tyrant, and far too starstruck by Kim Jong-un, a man who lords over a regime whose network of concentration camps makes the Soviet Union’s gulag system look tame in comparison. “[I]t now ought to be clear that the president’s shallow and slapdash attempts at dealmaking are not going to succeed,” said a Washington Post editorial the day after the talks.
So goes the conventional wisdom in Washington, DC. There is a feeling of confusion about what comes next. North Korea hawks and some Korea experts are all but celebrating the summit’s “failure” as confirmation that their pessimism was right all along. Victor Cha, the Asia director on George W. Bush’s National Security Council who is now the Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, somberly wrote that diplomacy may be at the “end of its rope.”
True, none of us know where the diplomacy goes from here. The reality of Trump and Kim flying back to their respective capitals with nothing to show for it—not even another non-binding and vague joint communique like the statement both signed in Singapore nine months ago—leads many analysts to describe the process as floundering and ineffective. Those of us on the outside looking in can’t even be sure why the summit last week adjourned without the press conference and signing ceremony that were included in the official schedule. U.S. and North Korean officials have completely different interpretations about what the other was offering and demanding; North Korean officials reject Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s claim that Pyongyang put forth unreasonable asks, such as a total lifting of UN Security Council sanctions.
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