While reading a WaPo analysis of the North Korean goals and motivations for the upcoming Kim-Trump meeting, it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen any real thought given to the other side – that is, an analysis of the United States’ negotiator, Donald J. Trump.
Consider: North Korea had a veritable cavalcade of nuclear and ICBM tests in 2017, to the point that the Western media was awash in reports and analysis, and Hawaii screwed up a drill enough to credibly frighten the state’s citizens that a missile was incoming.
Who do they face? The weakest American leader since at least Jimmy Carter, and more likely we’d have to go back to Presidents prior to World War II to identify a leader weaker than Trump. Why does this matter? Because Trump is well known to be an overconfident, insecure, foolish, bombastic, ignorant, and incurious man – and I choose each of those adjectives with care, not simply because I like those adjectives, but because each is applicable to Donald J. Trump.
The result is a leader who can be manipulated, not only by Americans and, possibly, Russians, but, I think, North Koreans.
Why did the North Koreans ask for this meeting, and schedule it for May? Why did they agree to meet with current CIA Directory Pompeo? Because they can read the tea leaves. Even if our form of government is foreign to them, even if our politics are currently more difficult to read than normal, it seems a safe bet that the next Congress, coming up in less than a year, will be far less compliant with President Trump than the current Congress.
Indeed, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that impeachment proceedings may begin soon after the next Congress convenes.
And that means that whatever North Korea wants out of the Americans has to be won soon, and that means Congressional debate before consent will be won, and that should take time.
So they hurry their twin weapons programs along and achieve a modicum of success, they successfully use that as propaganda to rattle the American President (which we can see from his frenzied Tweet-storms), and then they appeal to his vanity by giving him a chance to achieve something his predecessors did not: an accord with North Korea.
So how good is Kim Jong un? Will he be able to manipulate an elderly ignoramus who probably won’t even read the final accords?
Stay tuned.
