America's president has learned a humiliating lesson in diplomacy
The Economist
https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2018/05/24/donald-trump-cancels-his-meeting-with-kim-jong-un?cid1=cust/ddnew/email/n/n/20180524n/owned/n/n/ddnew/n/n/n/nNA/Daily_Dispatch/email&etear=dailydispatch&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily_Dispatch&utm_term=20180524
"SNIP.......
Perhaps Mr Kim will rush to repair the damage. Mr Trump is said to have such a high regard for his negotiating skills that he might not take much persuading to reconvene the cancelled talks. Yet this does not seem likely. The episode looks mainly like a high-powered exercise in educating Mr Trump in the salient fact of North Korean nuclear diplomacy: Mr Kim is not interested in negotiating away his one strategic advantage. If America has no short-term objective short of that—and Mr Trump did not obviously have one—there would be little to discuss.
Given the naivety Mr Trump has demonstrated, that is perhaps for the best. The fear that he would settle for a bad deal with Mr Kim, potentially upsetting the nuclear balance of East Asia by recognising North Korea as a nuclear power, increased with every hubristic tweet he put out on the summit. A recent suggestion by his national security adviser, John Bolton, that the administration viewed Libya’s decision to dismantle its nuclear arms programme as a model for North Korea was perhaps an effort to prevent that worrying outcome. Given that the subsequent fate of Libya’s then dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, who was toppled by an American-backed insurgency, is the thing Mr Kim fears most, it probably also helped persuade the North Koreans to torpedo the summit. Mr Bolton, who has long suggested there is nothing to be gained from such talks, is perhaps relieved.
An alternative fear is that Mr Trump may now return to considering the sort of military action against North Korea that Mr Bolton, almost alone in Washington, has advocated. It seems unlikely, however. The consensus view that there is no conscionable military solution to the North Korea problem has not shifted. Nor has the impression that Mr Trump sees foreign policy primarily as an opportunity to score a win (ideally, with a Nobel prize attached). Perhaps only Mr Bolton could view slaughter on the Korean peninsula as such.
The current international sanctions on North Korea—the toughest in over a decade—will continue. Perhaps Mr Trump will try to make them even more throttling. Yet as his administration’s attention turns increasingly to another nuclear threat, from Iran, it is not difficult to imagine him parking his ambition to rid the world of the North Korea nuclear threat. American policy towards Mr Kim’s dreadful regime has long been one of impotent neglect. It is possible Mr Trump will not revise that much.
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