Kenneth Dekleva draws parallels with American diplomacy with nuclear armed China and former enemy Vietnam in a post on 38 North:
So now comes the hard part. Singapore’s late Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew, were he still alive, would be hosting the crowning moment of his legendary career. I’d like to think that he, so prescient in his views of other leaders (he referred to China’s Xi Jinping as “in the Nelson Mandela’s class of persons [and] a person with enormous emotional stability who does not allow his personal misfortunes or sufferings affect his judgment—he is impressive”) would perceive Kim Jong Un as an aspirational leader, who has highlighted his desire to see North Korea move beyond nuclear weapons towards economic development, much like Vietnam’s Doi Moi policy in the 1980s. But the Kim-Trump summit will have its future challenges. Kim has, like the Chinese in the 1970s, started with grand gestures and communiqués, but now comes the long, patient and difficult work of diplomacy. One might recall that it took seven years from the 1972 Nixon-Mao summit until the establishment of US-China diplomatic relations in 1979. In the case of Vietnam, an even longer period of time elapsed before full US-Vietnamese diplomatic relations were established in 1995.
For Kim, a long period of diplomacy probably seems appropriate and doable. For Trump? I occasionally speak of being part of the ‘Instant Gratification Generation,’ and sometimes it seems like President Trump is as well. Will that doom the summit to failure? The United States to a humiliating agreement? Or we still have a long diplomatic period ahead of us, decorated with the bombast of Trump?
